My Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Computation in Physical Systems has just been published. As some of you know, it discusses three main topics: (i) what it takes for a physical system to implement a computation, (ii) whether every physical system implements computations, and (iii) which functions are physically computable. The …
Here .
In a review of John Haugeland’s Having Thought, Dan Dennett called Haugeland’s essay “Representational Genera” a “stunning piece” and a “display of philosophical move-making of the highest order” (Journal of Philosophy, December 1998). I, too, admire this piece by Haugeland, but it seems to have gotten little attention (the piece …
While working on a paper on neural computation, the following question came up: can you exert feedback control without processing information? The kind of case I have in mind is that of relatively simple feedback control devices that use one or two physical variable(s) to affect another. For instance, Watt …
Reading an unpublished paper by Nir Fresco led me to discover a website where Brian Cantwell Smith announces the imminent publication of his seven-volume “The Age of Significance,” to be published simultaneously online (one chapter per month over several years) and in print by MIT Press. BCS has been announcing …
I recently realized that the label “biological psychology” is quite popular among some psychologists, including at my university. For example, there are core courses, journals, and textbooks with that name. “Biological psychology” is used as roughly synonymous with “behavioral neuroscience,” which is another label popular in the same circles and explicitly refers …
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) …
