Why is the mind a self-programming system?

Abstract

How the mind works have always been one of the most important and fascinating puzzles. For a long time, countless scholars have devoted themselves to this research, but there has no decisive progress been made yet. We believe that the fundamental reason for this situation is that the research paradigm learned from the study of objective sciences such as physics is not applicable to the study of the mind. In this paper, we suggest that the proper way to study the mind is to think of it as a computational system that can program itself. In this self-programming system, there are two key components: storage structure and bootstrap program. In this paper, we only focus on analyzing the principle of the storage structure. Although this paper does not give a full mechanism of the self-programming system, the mere study of the storage structure can generate some important findings. Specifically, by using the storage structure, the problem of induction can be solved; And the mechanism of deduction and causality can easily be explained. Some of our findings sharply contrast with the existing theories. For example, we argue that the validity of induction is attributed to the intention of self-programming systems, not because it can be justified as mainstream inductivists try to prove.

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2022-08-15

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