le what exactly it is that we’re on to.
How will we come to make sense of the general claim that the brain is a computer? I think we have to resist talking solely in abstractions. We have to keep ourselves firmly rooted in the specific hypotheses that the brain computes X, Y and Z. What do these specific hypotheses have in common? What makes them tick? How do they give rise to systematic predictions and why do they seem to provide insightful explanations? What would we lose if, instead of saying that the brain computes depth from binocular disparity, we adopted a totally undefined term, ‘jorgmute’ (I know not what it is to ‘jorgmute’), and said that the brain jorgmutes depth from binocular disparity?
These questions are, in fact, just the sorts of questions you find philosophers of science regularly asking. To its credit, cognitive science (unlike other sciences, recently) has always welcomed and acknowledged the contributions of philosophers. As the late American philosopher Jerry Fodor wrote in The Language of Thought (1975):
One wants to say: ‘If our psychology is, in general, right then the nature of the mind must be, roughly, this …’ and then ﬁll in the blank. … [T]he experimentalist can work the other way around: ‘If the nature of the mind is roughly …, then our psychology ought henceforth to look like this: …’, where this blank is filled by new first-order theories. We ascend, in science, by tugging one another’s bootstraps.
The brain is almost certainly partly a computer. We still have to uncover what that means about our brains and about ourselves.