Philosophers' Carnival #112
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Author: Gualtiero Piccinini
Do Philosophers Rank their Journals?
A while ago Mark Couch alerted me to an article by Jeffrey Di Leo in Inside Higher Ed. Di Leo’s thesis is this: “It is one sign of the good health of the humanities that they have not caught rank and brand fever like many of the other disciplines in …
Aizawa on Turing-Equivalent Computation and Cognitive Science
In a previous thread, Ken Aizawa suggests that I’m insufficiently pluralistic about computation in cognitive science and to substantiate his criticism he points to his forthcoming article “Computation in Cognitive Systems; It’s not al about Turing-Equivalent Computation” (available on his website). Having read Ken’s nice paper, I only have time …
Information Processing, Computation, and Medium Independence
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 …
SEP Article on Computation in Physical Systems
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 …
Philosophers' Carnival #111
Here .
Feedback Control without Information Processing
While working on a paper on neural computation, the following question came up: can you exert feedback control without processing information? The kind of case I have in mind is that of relatively simple feedback control devices that use one or two physical variable(s) to affect another. For instance, Watt …