Thought Provoking Ideas Within Cognitive Science

Throughout the Cognitive Science degree, there are a plethora of arguments and claims thrown at you that have impacted the field heavily. While I would love to talk about all of them, I will limit myself to two of the areas I found to be incredibly thought provoking while learning about them: John Searle's Chinese Room Argument and Paul Churchland's paper titled Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes. I will not attempt to go into incredible detail with these subjects, as I'd prefer those reading this blog to learn about these topics in a similar way to me. Whether it's learning via the same/similar classes I took from SUNY Oswego, if you have a favorite youtuber that covers this content, or if you feel like reading it yourself, these are topics worth learning if you are interested in cognition (I assume you are since you're here!).

I will talk about the Chinese Room Argument first, as it is the first subject I learned out of the two, which I learned in the class titled Cognitive Systems with Professor Rhodes. Without going into the specifics of the implications of the argument, I will briefly describe the scenario. Imagine this:

A native speaker knows no Chinese, and is locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese Symbols (database) and a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (program). Imagine that people outside this room send in other Chinese Symbols which, unknown to the speaker in the box, are questions in Chinese (input). Then imagine that by following these instructions in the program, the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are the correct answers to the questions (output).

The one question I will leave you with on this argument is this: In this scenario, if the native speaker were to repeat this process of following instructions and arranging the symbols repeatedly, would he eventually learn Chinese?

Onto the second topic of intrigue, Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes. I will preface this section by saying that Paul Churchland didn't create the idea of Eliminative Materialism, but if you want to learn about it, he is a great source to learn about it from. There are a lot of things that you need to know about this argument in order to fully understand it, like what the hell are propositional attitudes or what's Materialism let alone Eliminative Materialism. I will let more experienced people like Professor Peterson describe that stuff, while I will ask some theoretical questions in response.

Is it possible that the everyday attributes we attribute towards others: Beliefs, Desires, Intentions, are theories? What if the mental states we describe and attribute within modern psychology are technically a part of a theory? What implications come from this?