There's a pretty interesting interview with the philosopher John Searle in the Boston Globe:
IDEAS: You think that questions about the mind are at the core of philosophy today, don't you?
SEARLE: Right. And that's a big change. If you go back to the 17th century, and Descartes, skepticism -- the question of how it is possible to have knowledge -- was a live issue for philosophy. That put epistemology -- the theory of knowledge -- at the heart of philosophy. How can we know? Shouldn't we seek a foundation for knowledge that overcomes skeptical doubts about it? As recently as a hundred years ago, the central question was still about knowledge. But now, the center of philosophical debate is philosophy of mind.
IDEAS: Why the change?
SEARLE: We know too much. The sheer volume of knowledge has become overwhelming. We take basic findings from physics and chemistry about the universe for granted. Knowing much more about the real world than our ancestors did, we can't take skepticism seriously in the old way. It also means that philosophy has to proceed on the basis of all that we know.
The universe consists of matter, and systems defined by causal relations. We know that. So we go on to ask: To what extent can we render our self-conception consistent with this knowledge? How can there be consciousness, free will, rationality, language, political organization, ethics, aesthetics, personal identity, moral responsibility? These are questions for the philosophy of mind.
Read the whole thing for his thoughts on consciousness and computation.
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Interesting interview, to be sure. But I'm dubious about his claim: "Knowing much more about the real world than our ancestors did, we can't take skepticism seriously in the old way."
This flies in the face of Descartes, as to what one can and can't doubt.
It suggests that (reductio ad absurdum), as scientific knowledge accumulates exponentially, our skepticism will decline logarithmically, until were are almost always willing to believe almost anything. Silly claim in an otherwise plausible interview.
Jonathan,
You may wish to re-read this article since I am free to be a fan of John Searle and his programatic "pragmatics." This rhetoric upon modern skepticism is relevant to quantam noise and machine learning and with emphasis on huerestics. From Searle, this, of course. There are no black holes, only greater and lesser accounts of escapism. Applied to the context of what is a computational machine then the matter of depression schematics will be a deeper well of thought than something that only symbolic meaning may project.