Want to dive into Scott Alexander's work and his thousands of blog posts? This fan website lets you sort and do semantic search through the whole codex. Enjoy!
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Scott argues that mental states like beliefs and preferences may not exist as unified entities in the brain, but rather emerge from collections of behaviors and contextual responses.
Scott explains connectionism as a neural network-based theory of mind that evolved from spreading activation models, showing how it resolves philosophical problems and mirrors brain function better than classical computing approaches.
Scott defends behaviorism as a sophisticated methodological approach that avoided using mental phenomena as fundamental explanations, connecting it to reinforcement learning and the idea that minds are behavior-executors rather than utility-maximizers.