Mechanism and the Rationality of Human Behaviour and Mind Essay

Mechanism and the Rationality of Human Behaviour and Mind - Essay Example In B. Jack Copeland’s paper entitled, Narrow versus Wide Mechanism: Including a Re-examination of Turing’s Views on the Mind-Machine Issue (Copeland, 2000), he examines the previous work by Alan Turing on the similarities between his Turing Machine and its similarities to the human brain. Also, the misinterpretations of Turing’s ideas by other theorists were presented in the paper, as well as other theories that either support or debunk them. On the other hand, the rationality of human behaviour in terms of choices and the products of such in the eyes of economists, behavioural analysts and social scientists were presented by Herbert A. Simon in his paper entitled, Bounded Rationality in Social Science: Today and Tomorrow (Simon, 2000). Changes in the trends concerning human choices over several decades as the effect of evolving cultures and ideas was explained and mulled over by seeing human behaviour as the result of decisions, along with theories and models th at could possibly explain why recurrences are possible in places where people are expected to be thinking differently from one another. The first paper is Copeland’s views on the connection between the human mind and Alan Turing’s computing machines, as well as the views of narrow and wide mechanisms’ school of thought. ... can do numerous tasks at the same time, several connections were made: The theory of mechanism is that the human body is made up of several parts that function as a whole, and much like machines such as clocks, each part has the task of contributing to the movement of the body. However, the human body is capable of self-repair and movement afterwards, while machines such as clocks do not have such capacity (Copeland, 2000, p. 6). The human mind and body are governed by sets of rules that allow it to move accordingly to what is needed, and that the selection of actions is determined by the pre-selected options in the mind, which are in the forms of memories. Much like in computers, problems are solvable only by what functions and options are available in their stored memories (Copeland, 2000, p. 8). Narrow mechanism believes that the mind is a machine that can be strictly simulated by a Turing machine, however, wide mechanism states that there is a strong possibility that although the human mind is indeed a machine, it cannot be imitated by a Turing machine thoroughly, thus dynamic and cognitive behavioural systems of the human mind cannot be calculated by the universal Turing machine (Copeland, 2000, p. 10). The creation of the computer was to make a machine capable of doing the computing work of hundreds to thousands of humans at the same time, proving the notion that similar to humans following a specific set of guidelines, logical computing machines when programmed with the appropriate procedures to do can also do anything that is within the set of instructions, making the process mechanical in nature (Copeland, 2000, pp. 13-14). However, several theorists proposed ideas that not all machines can be programmed to compute everything, and a time may come that some