I’m confused about your confusion about the “standard view”. If the brain was a memory-free function of external inputs to outputs, then sitting with your eyes closed and thinking would indeed not be possible. As it is, there are trillions of internal states in the brain and the state machine keeps ticking along. There are plenty of “internal inputs” to keep it going and going. Probably evolutionarily they were needed at some point to reflect on the external inputs and come up with a reasonable decision on how to mate or how to find food, but, once a capability is out there, it tends to take a life of its own, and instead of thinking of where to find the best mushroom, people think about properties of the roots of zeta function, or ruminate about everything that went wrong in their lives up to that moment.
I don’t think there’s anything confusing about the standard view in that example, as I said, the standard view allows for a recurrent brain, and it is consistent with being able to sit and think. My point here is that it is unhelpful in understanding how it is that brains compute. It gives a plausible story for the conditions under which cognitive systems might have come to be, but it does little in the way of explaining how it is that systems that came about in that way actually work, especially in more cognitive cases.
I’m confused about your confusion about the “standard view”. If the brain was a memory-free function of external inputs to outputs, then sitting with your eyes closed and thinking would indeed not be possible. As it is, there are trillions of internal states in the brain and the state machine keeps ticking along. There are plenty of “internal inputs” to keep it going and going. Probably evolutionarily they were needed at some point to reflect on the external inputs and come up with a reasonable decision on how to mate or how to find food, but, once a capability is out there, it tends to take a life of its own, and instead of thinking of where to find the best mushroom, people think about properties of the roots of zeta function, or ruminate about everything that went wrong in their lives up to that moment.
I don’t think there’s anything confusing about the standard view in that example, as I said, the standard view allows for a recurrent brain, and it is consistent with being able to sit and think. My point here is that it is unhelpful in understanding how it is that brains compute. It gives a plausible story for the conditions under which cognitive systems might have come to be, but it does little in the way of explaining how it is that systems that came about in that way actually work, especially in more cognitive cases.