In response to a previous thread, Jonathan Livengood asked some very good questions about, roughly, what should count as information processing and computation in physical systems. Perhaps it will help to take a step back. In my early work on computation, I argued that, roughly, only physical processes that take strings of digits …
By Jim Virtel The latest issue of BBS includes a précis of Edouard Machery’s Doing Without Concepts —the book that boldly argues that the term “concept” should be eliminated from psychology. The fourth tenet of Machery’s Heterogeneity Hypothesis (HH) proposes that prototypes, exemplars, and theories —three types of concept —are …
I know that most folks get their conference CFPs, etc. from other sources, but this one seems to me a) to be flying a little low on the radar and b) to be pretty cool. I went to one of these a long time ago in Florence, which was both …
In other Aizawa-relevant news, Steven Philips and Williams Wilson have a new theory of the systematicity of thought based on category theory. With their publication, they have joined an elite group of academics who have referred to my book, The Systematicity Arguments. (Fodor mentions it in LOT 2 and …
As many of you may know, I have been thinking about the following problem for a while: Suppose that scientists discover a high level property G that is prima facie multiply realized by two sets of lower level properties, F1, F2, …, Fn, and F*1, F*2, …, F*m. One response …
My Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Computation in Physical Systems has just been published. As some of you know, it discusses three main topics: (i) what it takes for a physical system to implement a computation, (ii) whether every physical system implements computations, and (iii) which functions are physically computable. The …
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