A Review of the Hypercomputation Literature

A. Syropoulos, Hypercomputation: Computing Beyond the Church-Turing Barrier. New York, Springer, 2008.There is now a wide range of proposals for physical (more or less) systems that purportedly compute functions that are not computable by Turing machines.  This new book reviews many proposals from the hypercomputation literature, such as infinite time …

Philosophers’ Carnival #81

Here.The carnival links to my previous post but contains a slight misunderstanding.  I wasn’t trying to argue that “cognition is computation plus X”; rather, I was arguing that the most plausible version of computationalism is that cognition is computation plus X.  I was being neutral on whether computationalism holds.

Self-Knowledge without Introspection

I just read a paper by Bob Gordon entitled “Simulation Without Introspection or Inference from Me to You” (in Mental Simulation, ed. M. Davies and T. Stone, Blackwell, 1996).  Bob argues that introspection (looking inside your mind/perceiving your mental states/observing the qualitative aspect of your mental states) is unnecessary for mental state …

The Resilience of Computationalism

Roughly speaking, computationalism is the view that cognition is computation.  Although some form of computationalism has been mainstream in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind for decades, many people remain sceptical of it.  Their reasons vary, but none of them amount to a refutation.In the philosophical literature, the most prominent objections to …

Back to Top