What Is Thought?

Although I spent very considerable time with this book, I conclude it is ultimately a failure in that it never addresses its title question. From the first, Baum asserts "the mind is a computer program," and therefore thought is the execution of a computer program. But he proves his statement by assertion, never by investigating how the mind's functioning is adequately described as a computer program. I would have been more convinced if he ever discussed how a computer program would debug itself. Analogizing with training of a neural net is not sufficient. He would have to explain how a program decided not to be a neural network, but rather .... but here his entire methodology breaks down. He would need a conceptual framework not borrowed from computer science, but from psychology, or philosophy, or metaphysics, or even poetry. But these disciplines are of course "non-rigorous," as is the functioning of mind. Another startling flaw in his argument is his devotion to Occam's razor, and how he elaborates this point. He asserts that observations that a dependent variable is linearly related to its independent variable is a compact description of reality, and therefore captures semantics, bridges the gap between observation and semantics. But the real question is, what is the agent that determines the linearity? The answer I offer is thought, human intelligence, mind. He has not done anything for the fundamental question of epistemology.