Realistic [?] Routes to Substrate Independent Minds

Susan Schneider sent me this interesting article about a new group apparently devoted to unifying efforts to build artificial minds.  Incidentally, the article contains a nice series of confused non sequiturs about computation and the brain: “When it comes to the brain and the mind, the strong neuroscientific consensus is …

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 …

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