One of the ways that the philosophical literature on computation is traditionally impoverished is that it tends to focus on just one or two paradigmatic examples, such as Turing machines or traditional digital computers. Perhaps because of this, some philosophers have produced accounts of physical computation from which it follows …
In my previous post, I introduced pancomputationalism–the idea that every physical system performs computations. There are three main versions of pancomputationalism. Unlimited pancomputationalism says that every physical system performs just about any computation you like. For example, a piece of the Berlin wall sitting outside a museum, like the one in …
Most of the philosophers who discuss computation are interested in computation because they are interested in the computational theory of cognition. Cognitive systems are typically assumed to represent things, and computation is supposed to help explain how they represent. So many philosophers conclude that computation is the manipulation of representations. …
John Schwenkler kindly asked me to blog about my new book, Physical Computation: A Mechanistic Account. I am grateful for the invitation. The original motivation for the research that led to the book was to make progress on the vexed question of whether cognition involves computation. That seems to require …
I recently published three articles that may be of interest to some readers: “The Cognitive Neuroscience Revolution,” (with Worth “Trey” Boone), Synthese. Articulates how cognitive neuroscience explains cognition in terms of representational, computational, multi-level mechanisms. “Access Denied to Zombies,” Topoi. Argues that in doing metaphysics we should pay closer attention …
The 6th International Workshop on Physics and Computation (PC 2015) (A satellite workshop to Unconventional Computation & Natural Computation 2015) 31 August – 4 September 2015 University of Auckland, New Zealand Special session on Physics and Computation at the Conference on Unconventional Computation & Natural Computation 2015 The 6th International …
In my Philosophy of Mind class, we just finished reading D. Hutto and E. Myin (2013), Radicalizing Enactivism, MIT Press. One good thing about this book is the way it carefully distinguishes various “enactivist” theses. 1. The mind is embodied, embedded, enactive, extended causally; that is, the mind causally interacts …
