This essay examines the possibility that phenomenological laws might be implemented by a computational mechanism by carefully analyzing key passages from the Prolegomena to Pure Logic. Part I examines the famous Denkmaschine passage as evidence for the view that intuitions of evidence are causally produced by computational means. Part II connects the less famous criticism of Avenarius & Mach on thought-economy with Husserl's 1891 essay 'On the Logic of Signs (Semiotic).' Husserl is shown to reaffirm his earlier opposition to associationist (...) (Humean) and adaptationist (Darwinian) explanations of our thought-machine on the ground that they cannot reconstruct the notion of truth and its syntactic mental preservation in symbolic thought-trains. Part III reveals Husserl's interesting commitment to the idea that descriptive sciences necessarily transform into explanatory sciences on pain of contradicting the essence of science as a rational ideal. Since explanation in relation to phenomenology means causal explanation, and causal explanation in the form of the Denkmaschine accounts for phenomenological intuition, it is inferred that the rationally compelling ideal of explanatory science requires a computationalist reading of the subsequent logical investigations. (shrink)

Hume once argued the basic science to be not physics but “the science of man” and the foundation of this science to be the empiricist mechanism of association governed by the law of similarity in appearance—now more popular than ever in the form of artificial neural networks. I update Hume’s picture by showing phenomenology to be centrally concerned with providing a unifying basis for all the sciences (including physics) by going beyond the psychology of associationism (passive synthesis) to reveal phenomena (...) that are irreducibly syntactic (not associative) in structure. I therefore argue that the language of thought (LOT) is the necessary mechanism at the basis of these descriptive phenomena. I conclude by sketching a new picture of all the sciences unified by LOT based on Husserl’s opposition to Galilean “physicomathematical” science vis-à-vis the life-world (Lebenswelt). (shrink)

The representations of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are formed from generalizing similarities and abstracting from differences in the manner of the empiricist theory of abstraction (Buckner, Synthese 195:5339–5372, 2018). The empiricist theory of abstraction is well understood to entail infinite regress and circularity in content constitution (Husserl, Logical Investigations. Routledge, 2001). This paper argues these entailments hold a fortiori for deep CNNs. Two theses result: deep CNNs require supplementation by Quine’s “apparatus of identity and quantification” in order to (1) (...) achieve concepts, and (2) represent objects, as opposed to “half-entities” corresponding to similarity amalgams (Quine, Quintessence, Cambridge, 2004, p. 107). Similarity amalgams are also called “approximate meaning[s]” (Marcus & Davis, Rebooting AI, Pantheon, 2019, p. 132). Although Husserl inferred the “complete abandonment of the empiricist theory of abstraction” (a fortiori deep CNNs) due to the infinite regress and circularity arguments examined in this paper, I argue that the statistical learning of deep CNNs may be incorporated into a Fodorian hybrid account that supports Quine’s “sortal predicates, negation, plurals, identity, pronouns, and quantifiers” which are representationally necessary to overcome the regress/circularity in content constitution and achieve objective (as opposed to similarity-subjective) representation (Burge, Origins of Objectivity. Oxford, 2010, p. 238). I base myself initially on Yoshimi’s (New Frontiers in Psychology, 2011) attempt to explain Husserlian phenomenology with neural networks but depart from him due to the arguments and consequently propose a two-system view which converges with Weiskopf’s proposal (“Observational Concepts.” The Conceptual Mind. MIT, 2015. 223–248). (shrink)

Yoshimi has attempted to defuse my argument concerning the identification of network abstraction with empiricist abstraction - thus entailing psychologism - by claiming that the argument does not generalize from the example of simple feed-forward networks. I show that the particular details of networks are logically irrelevant to the nature of the abstractive process they employ. This is ultimately because deep artificial neural networks (ANNs) and dynamical systems theory applied to the mind (DST) are both associationisms - that is, empiricist (...) theories that derive the principles of thought from the causal history of the organism/system. On this basis, I put forward a new aspect of the old argument by noting that ANNs & DST are the causal bases of the phenomena of passive synthesis, whereas the language of thought hypothesis (LOT) and the symbolic computational theory of mind (CTM) are the causal bases of the phenomena of active synthesis. If the phenomena of active synthesis are not distinct in kind from and are thus reducible to those of passive synthesis, psychologism results. Yoshimi’s program, insofar as it denies this fundamental phenomenological distinction, is revealed to be the true anti-pluralist program, by essentially denying the causal efficacy of the mechanistic foundations of active synthesis by referring phenomenology exclusively to associationism for its causal foundation. (shrink)