Computing versus human thinking

Reviewer: Arturo Ortiz-Tapia

Peter Naur's radical view of some aspects of modern psychology and historical philosophy, with regard to the inner workings of the human mind, is presented in a perfectly understandable, and a daringly new, way. Whether we should agree with his views or not is another matter. Naur mainly challenges the views of behaviorism and cognitivism, and I have to agree with him; they are insufficient for describing the functioning of the human mind. There are psychological therapies based on other approaches that are apparently more successful, like gestalt therapy and transgenerational therapy. The title of this work may seem deceiving at first glance, precisely because Naur spends several pages contending against the aforementioned psychological studies, and those philosophical trends supporting Turing's vision that thinking is something that can be performed by someone or something. However, a careful read of the article reveals Naur's opinion that a thought is a process. Providing a probable description of this process or set of processes through the "synapse-state theory of mental life," developed by the author, is the goal of this article. I think a rough description of the synapse-state can be as follows: there are external stimuli, and on the nervous boundary of us there are transducers, namely nerve cells, that transform the external stimuli into something the brain can process. The transducers connect to sensory nodes, and on these there are sense synapses. From here, there are multiple connections to different zones of the brain that may generate some sort of transitory thought, called the "specious present," the sum of which may lead to an actual external action, again through synaptic connections from the brain through glands of the body or the muscles, through motor synapses. For me, it seems that the synapse-state theory describes the brain as a collection of finite state machines, complexly interwoven, and able to generate triggers for other zones of the brain, which in turn may send more triggers until something is actually performed inside the brain, and from the brain to the outside. Candace Beebe Pert presented similar views to Naur's [1] using peptides instead of Naur's synapse states, attention layers, specious presents (SPECS), and motor synapses. Therefore, although Naur's view of thought uses a cybernetic approach, the concept, I think, is not entirely new. Some seminal (and similar) ideas were around long before Naur's article. The synapse-state theory might be a no-nonsense point of departure for developing robots or other machines that could interact more realistically with the external world, but some more research is needed to actually make this theory the "one-and-only" for a description of the mind. Online Computing Reviews Service