Topics Mind

Question How do thoughts exist in our brains? How are they stored? Is this a chemical or electrical process?

Accepted:
October 24, 2005

Comments

To properly answer your question, I'd need the help of a cognitive psychologist and a neuroscientist, more money than God has, and at least a hundred years. Make that two hundred years.

To the extent that yours is a philosophical question, rather than a question for science, it's a question about what thoughts would have to be like in order to account for the known, everyday facts about beliefs, desires, imaginings, etc. There are a few different philosophical schools of thought on this question.

One group of philosophers think that it's unlikely that there is any systematic correspondence between what we ordinarily think of as "thoughts" (?!?) and goings-on in the brain. According to these folks, our talk of beliefs and desires and such just reflects our apprehension of broad and complex patterns in our observable behavior. Philosophers in this group include Willard van Orman Quine, and Donald Davidson.

According to another group -- a group to which I belong -- beliefs and desires must correspond to some kind of isolable neurological states or events; otherwise they couldn't play the role they do play in enabling us to predict and explain our behavior. The most plausible proposal about what kinds of states these might be is, in my view, the view that says that thoughts are actually sentences in a "language of thought", expressed by means of some kind of neurological code, on analogy with the "machine language" employed by computers at the most basic level. If thoughts are literally sentences, then they have logical form, and this wpi;d explain why our thoughts can be linked in logical order, and why the way we think of something has implications for how we behave toward it. And if these sentences are actually physically realized in neuron firings, or in specific configurations of neurons, then that explains how thoughts can actually cause things to happen. The main proponent of this view is Jerry Fodor. On this view, thoughts are physical -- though whether they are chemical or electrical depends on how the neurological code is organized.

There's another group of philosophers who would agree that thoughts are physical states of the brain, but who disagree that these states are sentence-like. They think that the brain is not organized the way a digital computer is, but rather as a network of neurological nodes, that stimulate and repress each other's electrical activity. This general theory is called "connectionism." Different connectionists have proposed treating thoughts in different ways. On some connectionist models, a given thought is identified with a particular node, or a particular set of nodes. On others, a thought is a kind of logical construct over a pattern of network activation, or a pattern of "settings" on the nodes in a particular network. One fan of connectionism, Paul Churchland, would say that connectionism really takes us back to the first position, and shows that "thought" doesn't correspond satisfactorily to any natural neurological structure or grouping.

Question How do thoughts exist in our brains? How are they stored? Is this a chemical or electrical process? Accepted:October 24, 2005

Question How do thoughts exist in our brains? How are they stored? Is this a chemical or electrical process?

Accepted:
October 24, 2005