Understanding Pop Psychology and Turing Machines

Pop Psychology: Psychology explains the behavior of an individual based on their mental states, manifested in the form of propositional attitudes such as wanting or creating. These mental states refer to something, i.e., they have intentionality, and can be analyzed linguistically as propositional attitudes. These are statements containing a verb that expresses an attitude towards a proposition, e.g., Alex believes the economics teacher is pretty. In this case, Alex holds an attitude (believes that) towards a proposition (the economics teacher is pretty). Thus, we understand the contents of Alex's state of mind given the proposition and can explain their behavior based on that belief.

It's the kind of psychology that's most popular and widespread due to three reasons:

• It is easily accessible and allows us to understand someone's behavior and intentions through what they say.
• The depth of the theory explains how behavior and beliefs interact, providing laws.
• Its indispensability, and the fact that we often express our behavior and psychology this way. Jerry Fodor supports this.

Description of a Turing Machine

Description of a Machine: A Turing machine is an algorithm based on two basic ideals: its memory is unlimited, and it never makes errors. We imagine it as an infinite tape divided into squares. The machine is placed on one of them, reading what's in it, and then carrying out the instruction given to it. Turing's thesis states that if there is a procedure that can be solved algorithmically, there will be a Turing machine that can do it. However, there are also unsolved problems to which the machine does not respond. We represent a Turing machine through an infinite tape divided into squares on which a reader moves to read the symbol table. The reader can delete, transcribe, or change it. Furthermore, a hexagon represents the state of the machine, and the computer will contain an R or an L depending on the direction of movement of the reader. Two or more statements can be combined, resulting in a loop that performs a function continuously. The arrows indicate the succession of states. With the set of hexagons, arrows, and symbols, we can provide a computational description of the task of the machine.