TWO PROJECTS AND A PICTURE

Any attempt to understand how minds work must address, at the very least, two questions. The first is essentially an engineering question. One way of putting the question would be: how can one build a mind? This project is an engineering one. And, adopting a neologism first coined by Colin McGinn (1989), I shall refer to it as the project of psychotectonics: ‘psycho’, here, pertaining to minds, and ‘tectonics’ deriving from the Latin verb for building. Psychotectonics, then, is the science of building minds. In order to begin the project of psychotectonics, one must first have a reasonably adequate grasp of the things a mind can do, a grasp of the various functions of the mind. Then, it is thought, one must proceed to show, firstly, how these functions can be broken down into component sub-functions and these sub-functions broken down into sub-sub-functions, and so on, and, secondly, how these progressively more and more simple functions can be realized in progressively more and more simple mechanisms. To understand how to build a mind, it is claimed, is to be able to effect this sort of functional and mechanistic decomposition. This is a standard account of what is involved in psychotectonics, an account enshrined in David Marr's (1982) famous tripartite distinction between computational, algorithmic, and physical levels of analysis; whose basic idea is reflected in Dennett's (1978b) distinction between intentional, design, and physical stances; whose ethos is captured in the general project, also endorsed by Dennett (1978b) among others, of homuncular functionalism.