Philosophers’ Carnival #76
Here.
Why Multiple Realization Arguments don’t Refute Physicalism
On a side note, I just found out that a recent paper of mine partially reduplicates an argument made by Gualtiero in one of his papers (with some differences in emphasis). Nice.At anyrate, I have been thinking about multiple realization. Now, whether these kinds of arguments refute any of the …
The Ambiguity of “Connectionism”
The standard pop story about connectionism in philosophical circles goes somewhat as follows: connectionism is an alternative to computationalism, or at least to classical computationalism, that emerged in the 1980s. This story is largely a myth due in part to the ambiguity of the term “connectionism”.“Connectionism” has come to mean several different …
Finite “TM” programs and computational complexity
Suppose one is allowed denumerably many letters in an alphabet and denumerably many instructions (i.e., denumerably many four-tuples of the “Q1 0 1 Q2” (quintuples would do as well) in a TM program. Then one can treat each of the standard numerals in decimal notation as a letter in …
Turing, symbol manipulation, and computation
One often finds computation described as having originated with Alan Turing and as symbol manipulation. Yet, Turing imposed certain sorts of finiteness conditions on computations, such as that a program must be finite in length. These finiteness conditions are not captured in the description of computation as symbol manipulation. So, …
Reduced in Kirchberg
I’m just back from Kirchberg am Wechsel where the annual Wittgenstein Symposium took place. This year’s edition was vastly inspiring for me – maybe because the good old Ludwig never really featured in plenary talks.
Philosophy of (Neuro)Science Discussion on Comp-neuro
A fascinating discussion on the nature of scientific modeling, inter-level explanation, hierarchical decomposition, etc., in computational neuroscience has been unfolding over the last couple of weeks on the Comp-neuro newsgroup. Archives can be found here.