Next August, I’m presenting a paper entitled “Connectionist Computation” at the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks. The paper, which will be published in the conference proceedings, is an account of why (some) connectionist systems perform computations even though they don’t execute programs.(Background: In 2005, Martin Roth published a paper …
Church’s Thesis After 70 Years is a very expensive collection of new papers on the Church-Turing thesis. It was published by Ontos Verelag a few months ago. It is edited by Adam Olszewski and Jan Wolenski.An Introduction to Gödel’s Theorems is a fairly affordable, sophisticated introduction and discussion of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems and related topics, including the …
The connectionism that most people know about become popular in the 1980s. It is defined, more or less, as the attempt to explain or model cognitive functions using artificial neural networks. The name “connectionism” for this movement goes back at least to a 1982 article by Feldman and Ballard (“Connectionist Models …
I just discovered that the view that everything in the universe is a computing system is “now often called” ‘pancomputationalism’, as Vincent Mueller puts it. Mueller is right. As of today, Googling ‘pancomputationalism’ generates 195 results, beginning with the omnipresent wikipedia article (titled “digital physics”). I had no idea; for all I knew, I …
Vincent Mueller has posted a note on digital states at Interdisciplines. Below is my brief commentary…
The European Science Foundation has been working on ranking academic journals in various disciplines. Here are their brand new rankings of journals in philosophy and in history and philosophy of science.I recently spoke with a member of the committee that ranked philosophy journals. He explained the ESF criteria as follows:Journals that …
Carl Craver, Explaining the Brain: Mechanisms and the Mosaic Unity of Neuroscience, OUP, 2007. The book has been released in Europe. Americans will have to wait a few more weeks, though they can pre-oder it at Amazon. I observed the development of this book from its very beginning, and I …
