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 …
You may (or may not) have noticed that Pete Mandik and Richard Brown (me) have started a podcast, called SpaceTimeMind, where we talk about tax law updates for 2014, uh, I mean, er, we talk about space and time and mind! The first episode is up now (and has been …
Three consecutive special issues of the Journal of Cognitive Science on this topic are on their way out. The first issue opens with David Chalmers’s seminal paper with the same title (which was written in 1993 and posted on his website but never officially published until now) and is followed by four …
An interesting confrence on Church’s Thesis, with excellent speakers, takes place in Krakow, Poland, on June, 3-5. See the conference website.
As I mentioned some time ago , Andrea Scarantino and I wrote a paper on the relationships between information processing, computation, and cognition. As far as I know, it is the broadest and most systematic discussion of this topic to date. It also corrects a number of (what we consider) …
In a new paper by Andrea Scarantino and me, we outline the relations between cognition and (different notions of) computation and information processing, as well as the relations between the different notions of computation and information processing. To my knowledge, this has not been done before (except in an earlier, less sophisticated …
