But by the same token, the brain can't arrive at any of these things on its own.
By the same token, changes in brain activity, on their own, tell us very little about cognitive abilities.
By the same token, a particular brain state is neither a necessary, nor a sufficient condition of someone's having a memory of something.
First, even if some beliefs involve an actual episode in the believer's mind, say the tokening of some brain state that can be said to samesay u, there are other beliefs, implicit beliefs, for which it is implausible to insist that they are had because of the actual existence of a token state that is capable of entering into the samesaying relation to an utterance.
For example, an expression of the form '___ has the (narrow) content that [p]' is said to have as its extension "in any possible world the class of brain state tokens whose (broad) content is p, along with physically identical tokens in all doppelgangers of people who harbor tokens whose broad content is p" (Stich 1991, p. 247).
Token-identity says that each particular mental state token is identical to a physical brain state token.
The modal argument is also criticized in Gibbons (1993), who claims that a belief state token can remain identical to a brain state token, even if its content had been different, as long as we reject the assumption that mental state tokens have their contents essentially.
Like SpamProbe, it would just be shuffling symbols, but if the A.I. people are right, token shuffling is all that human brains do.
For example, the symbol W might represent water by virtue of some causal, covariational relation it enjoys to actual water in the world: under suitable conditions, actual water causes an electronic token of W to appear in the brain.
Radiologists would do a pretty poor job if they tried to deliver babies or operate on brain tumors, and by the same token, doctors in other fields often make mistakes when they try to practice radiology without benefit of training.
