Noah Horwitz

Mentation: on a Wave of Computation Noah Horwitz

Mentation is ostensibly an attempt to synthesize the best current theory we have about consciousness (Hameroff and Penrose's Orch OR theory), about the mind (the computational theory of the mind?in particular as articulated by Jerry Fodor), and about the fundamental nature of the brain (Karl Pribram's holonomic theory) into a single philosophy of mind. As part of this synthesis, this text advocates that the very neural correlate of consciousness has been discovered (and notes the consequences) and that fundamentally the mind makes use of, what the author calls, wave form computation. Various aspects of the mind such as memory, dreams, the unity of consciousness, free will, etc. are reinterpreted in the light of the wave form computation that forms the basis of the mind. In doing so, competing theories of consciousness and mind such as the information-theoretic theory, higher-order theory, Ned Block's theory, Daniel Dennett's, and Jesse Prinz's amongst others are critically evaluated. A full computational approach is developed in order to analyze the cyborgs being built today, the purpose of consciousness, our relation to the divine, and other topics. Ultimately, the model of the mind as neural software is articulated as a fundamentally new discourse on the nature of the one-multiple. Table of Contents §1. Introduction: The Origin of Mentality §2. Fast Fourier Transformations: The Waveform and Mentation §3. The Computational Theory of Mind §4. Criticisms of the Computational Theory of Mind §5. The Neural Correlate of Consciousness §6. The Orch OR Theory of Consciousness §7. From Penrose to Gödel: The Incomputable §8. The Unity of Consciousness §9. The Information-Theoretic Theory of Consciousness: A Rejection §10. Why Consciousness? §11. The Self: Being Some One §12. Memory §13. The Confabulatory Mind: Computational Freud §14. A Return to the Hard Problem: The Conscious and the Unconscious §15. The Split Within §16. Not HOT: From Self-Reflection to Emotion §17. A Theory of Free Will §18. Today's Cyborgs: Input, Output, and the Mind's Blackbox §19. Conclusion: From the Resurrection to Divine Intuition