Philosophers' Carnival #113
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Category: Mindcraft
Posts from the founder of Brains, Gualtiero Piccinini.
The Demise of "Cognitive Science"
For several years, I’ve felt that cognitive science as it was originally conceived is being progressively replaced by cognitive neuroscience. By “cognitive science as it was originally conceived,” I mean primarily the alliance between traditional cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence (either “classicist” or “connectionist”), supplemented by contributions from linguistics, philosophy of …
Realistic [?] Routes to Substrate Independent Minds
Susan Schneider sent me this interesting article about a new group apparently devoted to unifying efforts to build artificial minds. Incidentally, the article contains a nice series of confused non sequiturs about computation and the brain: “When it comes to the brain and the mind, the strong neuroscientific consensus is …
Philosophers' Carnival #112
Here .
Do Philosophers Rank their Journals?
A while ago Mark Couch alerted me to an article by Jeffrey Di Leo in Inside Higher Ed. Di Leo’s thesis is this: “It is one sign of the good health of the humanities that they have not caught rank and brand fever like many of the other disciplines in …
Aizawa on Turing-Equivalent Computation and Cognitive Science
In a previous thread, Ken Aizawa suggests that I’m insufficiently pluralistic about computation in cognitive science and to substantiate his criticism he points to his forthcoming article “Computation in Cognitive Systems; It’s not al about Turing-Equivalent Computation” (available on his website). Having read Ken’s nice paper, I only have time …
Information Processing, Computation, and Medium Independence
In response to a previous thread, Jonathan Livengood asked some very good questions about, roughly, what should count as information processing and computation in physical systems. Perhaps it will help to take a step back. In my early work on computation, I argued that, roughly, only physical processes that take strings of digits …