How Can One Catch a Thought-Bird? Some Wittgensteinian Comments to Computational Modelling of Mind

In this essay I analyse Wittgenstein’s criticism of several assumptions that are crucial for a large part of cognitive science. These involve the concepts of computational processes in the brain which cause mental states and processes, the algorithmic processing of information in the brain (neural system), the brain as a machine, psychophysical parallelism, the thinking machine, as well as the confusion of rule following with behaviour in accordance with the rule. In my opinion, the theorists of cognitive science have not yet seriously considered Wittgenstein’s criticism so they, quite surprisingly, frequently confuse the question »how does it work?« with »what does it do?« But their most »deleterious« mistake is their confusion of the internal computational (or parallel) processes taking place in the brain (which possibly cause mental states) with socially-based, everyday criteria of recognition and classification of, and knowledge about, the content of mental states. The title of this essay is metaphorical. I believe that watching a human thought in action is as difficult as catching a flying bird (with one’s hands). We have a chance to catch a bird only when it happens to come sufficiently close, perhaps pausing for a moment to sit on a branch next to us, or when it lands right in front of us to grab some food. But at that moment it is not a »flying bird«, but at most a bird that is just about to start flying (again). Yet, even in such moments our chances of getting hold of the bird are very small, a fact probably well known to anyone who has already tried to catch a bird. A human thought is much like a bird. Most of the time thoughts »fly« through our minds, meaning that they appear in our consciousness for a moment and then promptly disappear, i.e. are replaced with new thoughts. The very attempt to understand what happens inside our minds when we think some thought changes that thought into something else (another thought). In much the same way, we cannot understand how it is possible that with our thought we can ‘touch’ things that are entirely different from that thought, perhaps physically inaccessible or even non-existent. But as soon as we contemplate the thought in this manner, that thought ‘escapes’ us, and we end up staring in surprise, unable to understand what is happening. At times it may seem to us that the thought has stopped, so to say, that it stands clear in our sight and we will be able to seize it and understand what it is and what it means to »have a thought in one’s mind« or to »think about this or that«. This phenomenon can be experienced when we, say, puzzle over a completely ‘absorbing’ problem and some particular thought is one of the assumptions that constitute that problem. However, as soon as we concentrate on that particular thought and move away from the problem which it constitutes, the thought often disappears promptly, i.e. escapes our mental horizon. This is one of the reasons why assumptions about the problem are difficult to analyse – for us, they make sense only insofar as we experience them as part of the problem, but this sense is lost as soon as we analyse them as such. Wittgenstein presents a similar difficulty in his Philosophical Investigations (PI, 1976). »’The queer thing, thought’ – but it does not strike us as queer when we are thinking. Thought does not strike us as mysterious while we are thinking, but only when we say, as it were retrospectively: ‘How was that possible?’ How was it possible for thought to deal with the very object itself? We feel as if by means of it we had caught reality in our net.« (PI, par. 428). Thoughts seem to be an extremely elusive ‘mental phenomenon’. We know what they are as long as no one asks us, but once asked, we no longer know, to paraphrase Augustine’s witty remark about time. Many other ‘mental phenomena’ produce similar experiences, for example, understanding, intention, wish, will, feeling and so on. In Wittgenstein’s words, this is not the kind of question typically posed by the natural sciences, but »... something that we know when no one asks us, but no longer know when we are supposed to give an account of it, is something we need to remind ourselves of. (And it is obviously something of which for some reason it is difficult to remind oneself.)« (PI, par. 89). During his ‘late stage’ Wittgenstein pointed out how erroneous it is to seek causes and reasons for the elusiveness and indefiniteness of mental phenomena in their secretive nature, for example, strictly private ‘internal’ processes that are supposedly accessible only to pure introspection and about which one can speak only in the first person singular, with no other person being able to know about these processes except the person who is being introspective. According to this understanding, people can reach hypothetical conclusions about the mental states of others only on the basis of that person’s visible behaviour, so the domain of the mental presumably fits into an entirely different order of things and events than the domain of the physical. Wittgenstein strongly rejected this idea, arguing that it was absurd. Yet he also rejected the views of behaviourists, whom the elusiveness and subjectivity of mental states led to conclude that intellectuality, thinking, consciousness and the like were just appearances not grounded in reality, meaning that all we are left with is the physical behaviour of people. He speaks of the grammatical fiction of behaviourism (PI, par. 308) and says: »How does the philosophical problem about mental process and states and about behaviourism arise? – The first step is the one that altogether escapes notice. We talk of processes and states and leave their nature undecided. Sometime perhaps we shall know more about them – we think. But that is just what commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter. For we have a definite concept of what it means to learn to know a process better... – And now the analogy which was to make us understand our thoughts falls to pieces. So we have to deny the yet uncomprehended process in yet unexplored medium. And now it looks as if we had denied mental processes. And naturally we don’t want to deny them« (par. 309). Wittgenstein points out that to talk about the thinking process, as a ‘non-corporeal’ process is misleading because thought cannot be separated from speech and behaviour. Such talk expresses our confusion arising from, on the one hand, our attempt to determine the meaning of the word ‘to think’ in a primitive manner, and on the other, our grammatical differentiation between, say, the grammar of the word ‘to think’ and that of ‘to eat’ (PI, 376 SYNTHESIS PHILOSOPHICA A. Ule, How Can One Catch a 40 (2/2005) pp. (373–388) Thought-Bird?