The Church-Turing fallacy is the fallacy of supposing that the Church-Turing thesis (CT) or some other idea of Church and Turing entails that the mind can be explained computationally (i.e., computationalism). (The term ‘Church-Turing fallacy’ is due to Jack Copeland.)IMHO, CT is one of the technical ideas most heavily abused by philosophers of mind.CT …
As I mentioned earlier, an issue of Synthese devoted to computational explanation in neuroscience and related topics is about to come out. The articles are now available on the Synthese website. (You can see the abstracts; to see the articles, you or your institution needs to subscribe to the journal.)G. Piccinini, …
As some of you may know, I am engaged in a long-term campaign against the view that concrete computations (computational states, computing mechanisms) are individuated, even in part, by their semantic properties. Of course, computations may be interpreted, i.e., assigned semantic content, but this is not part of their individuation. …
new web page dedicated to the philosophy of neuroscience
A topic that has received increasing attention in the last few years is hypercomputation (see also the Wikipedia article), a term coined by Jack Copeland for the computation of functions that are not computable by Turing machines. Real numbers are often invoked in recipes for hypercomputation. I have tried to explain my skepticism …
I’ve just finished a paper corresponding more or less to my 2005 Eastern APA talk on the Physical Church-Turing thesis. The topic is a bit far from the concerns of mainstream philosophers of mind, but still relevant. It’s about what can be physically computed, which is relevant to what can …
Oron Shagrir informed me that three of the lectures from the recent Workshop on the Origins and Nature of Computation that took place in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv have been posted online, courtesy of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.Martin Davis, “The Church-Turing Thesis: Consensus and Opposition“Saul Kripke, “From Church’s Thesis to …
