Posts from the founder of Brains, Gualtiero Piccinini.
In Ken Aizawa’s simple (and in my opinion compelling) argument against the extended mind hypothesis applied to consciousness, he assumed that properties and relations of lower-level enties determine those of higher-level entities. In the comments, Adam Arico asked about emergence and Flora Carpenter further elaborated as follows: Higher level states may …
In comments to a recent post, Ken Aizawa raised the following question: How is the development of a counterexample [to a philosophical theory] different than the development of a falsifiable/falsified prediction of a scientific theory? I think this is a fascinating question that gets at the heart of contemporaty philosophical methodology, and I’d be curious to …
A foreign student emailed me the following questions.(1) According to Jerry Fodor, does intentionality reduce to the reference of mental symbols plus the relation between the subject and the symbols? (2) Under this theory, what happens to Gricean “communicative intentionality”? As far as I can tell the answer to (1) …
In a recent post, I noticed that the debate over representationalism about consciousness is often conducted by discussing putative counterexamples, i.e., experiences that some philosophers find to be intuitively different even though according to some representationalist theories, they have the same representational content. These examples are usually met by representationalists who …
Here.
It is possible to take two opposite lines on the origin of the modern computer. (There should also be a place for Babbage in this story, but I will set that aside.) One line says that Turing invented the computer in his 1936 mathematical paper. After that, it was just …
Today, an email exchange with Michael Rescorla made me wonder about the received view among philosophers of cognitive science. In the 1980s, the received view used to be something like the language of thought hypothesis, or at least some symbols-and-rules framework of which the language of thought hypothesis was the …
