Alvin Goldman, Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading, OUP, 2006.How do we understand other minds? I was introduced to this problem by a psychologist, Susan Johnson. In her course of Theory of Mind, the main debate seemed to be between those who think we have an innate …
In a previous post, I expressed scepticism about a recent argument by Gillett and Rives to the effect that determinable properties don’t exist: only determinate properties do. Yesterday, we discussed Gillett and Rives’ paper in the NEH Summer Seminar on Mind and Metaphysics. Curiously, John Heil (who probably doesn’t read …
The workshop on the Origins and Nature of Computation is over. It was an amazing experience: many of the best computability theorists and computer scientists, philosophers of computation, and historians of computation discussing together. One of the presenters, Stewart Shapiro, has a new book on Vagueness in Context (OUP, 2006), …
As told by Martin Davis:A woman heading a research group on theoretical computer science at Microsoft meets Bill Gates for the first time. She says how wonderful it is for Bill Gates to head a company that supports a group–her research group–that has little chance of generating any application before …
In my Eastern APA talk last year, I argued that a genuinely random physical process should not be counted as a computation (in the interesting sense of the term). Jack Copeland disagreed.So here in Jerusalem, I took the opportunity to ask two “great men” for their opinion. I’m happy to …
Here are some things I found out last night from John McCarthy:When he famously created Lisp (which became the standard programming language in AI), he had gotten the idea of list processing from Allen Newell and Herbert Simon at the Darmouth conference on AI in 1956.When he “stole” the lambda …
I’m in Jerusalem at the workshop on The Origins and Nature of Computation, which started today. Many of the most prominent historians and philosophers of computation are here (e.g., Kripke, Copeland, Sieg, Shagrir, Stewart Shapiro), and so are some of the founding fathers of computer science (e.g., Martin Davis, John …
