In trying to come up with some method for the "brain only" brain to construct the right physical structure to "be" any specific idea which couldn't exist in the brain before it could be physically inside it, I'm afraid that a proposed trial and error method fails on two counts. If the brain built an idea-structure, with nothing to go on, gave it a trial and found it wanting, it might learn that it built the wrong thing but that would tell it virtually nothing about what the right thing to build would be. It would only get the "brain only" brain back to square one where it had, somehow, concluded it needed to build a new idea it didn't contain. How it would know that the idea was wrong instead of concluding that it had a new and novel reality that it had to account for is only one of the questions I came up with in thinking about about that solution to save the materialist model of the mind. If any idea that didn't mesh with preexisting ideas already in such a brain-mind were to be automatically rejected then all innovation would be expected to always meet the same fate of rejection. Perhaps such an idea doesn't occur to materialists because they tend to be such stuck in the mud, conventional thinkers who are always pretending that human knowledge is complete or nearly so. Perhaps materialism is a result of the intrinsically conservative mind, which accounts for why it inevitably serves that materialist status quo.
And I don't think there is any way to make such a cumbersome model of the construction of "brain only" ideas fit with the nearly instantaneous experience of having new ideas come to us which are an exact or close fit to match our sense of reality. Even things that couldn't possibly have had the path for them in earlier ideas can arise in our experience and cognition which are such a close fit to our sense of reality that such a trial and error method of thought construction in the absence of already existing information about it can't be made to seem realistic. It doesn't take the real time experience of thinking into account.
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I don't think computers are a good model of the mind, at all, for reasons I've gone into before. For a start, computers can't serve as a metaphor telling us about human minds because they were invented as a metaphor of human minds, an artificial version of what scientists can devise as mimicking of human thinking of a specific kind. That kind of information flow is one way, it doesn't loop back. It would be like taking a department store manikin and, on the basis of how that is made, conclude that you understand the circulatory system or other aspects of human anatomy. I wouldn't want my doctor to have studied anatomy with that held as a conventional model. And there is nothing in a computer that isn't either put there by human beings, who put them there either by intention to produce a planned range or possible results or kind of result or by mistake, in which case the program will likely not function or will function badly. The computer will perform the program but it can't tell itself that the program is bad, though it can be made to return a range of possibilities if it gets stuck. You can make a program perform trials and errors and other operations but not if those aren't put there by programmers, the machine doesn't come up with those all on its own. It doesn't have an own, it doesn't have anything, though in our confusion over the appearance of autonomous action we use words that say it is what it can't be. But that impression doesn't have any more reality than is put there by human beings anymore than a teddy bear does no matter how much a child invests their imagination into their beloved toy. There is something rather childish about the idea that computers are more than complicated machines built by people. I, also, went into that earlier this year.
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You know, for people who are so convinced of your own brilliance you do some really stupid things. Like letting me know how easy it is to irritate you by changing the font size on my blog. You give a short, skinny, homely, gay, Irish guy that kind of information as you deride me and expect me to not use it, only proves that you've got an inflated sense of your own intelligence. As well that dissing pop songs is like a raspberry seed stuck in your ..... well, I suppose it's probably more like one stuck under your denture at your age, isn't it. Did you notice, I switched to Georgia typeface there, too.
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