Experimental psychology is giving us an ever-more detailed catalogue of the competences and frailties of the mind—the triumphs of perception and the embarrassments of illusion, the pace of language learning and the conditions of distraction, lust, fear, and mirth—and now, as “convinced materialists,” we need to figure out how on earth the brain does it all, without postulating wonder tissue. As our understanding grows, what counts as wonder tissue shifts. When “connectionist” and other “neural network” models burst on the scene in the mid-1980s, they demonstrated learning capabilities and pattern-recognition powers that nobody would have dared postulate in small tracts of neurons a few years earlier. We still don’t know exactly how—or even if—the brain exploits the computational powers exhibited by these semi-realistic models, but it is now okay to postulate a connectionist competence for some neural network that you can’t yet explain as long as you are upfront about it and the competence is not clearly beyond the demonstrated range of feats. The main objection to wonder tissue is that it does not give us a way of solving the problem, but a way of giving up, of assuming that it is a mystery that can never be solved.
Source:
Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s Book Intuition Pumps
