10. Computationalism

Our computational nature: comment on Barrett et al.

“…The notion of computation is philosophically complex, with many different meanings and a multifaceted history (Piccinini, 2012 ). By “computation,” evolutionary psychologists fundamentally mean to say that the brain evolved to compute in the generic sense of the term.…”

The Promises of Complexity Sciences: A Critique

“…One of the starts was the work of Shannon and Weaver who, along with the cyberneticians, developed and extended the theory of information to machines, animals and human psychology (Bateson 2000;Dupuy 2000). Another start is represented by the inventors of the digital computer and the initiators of cognitivism and Artificial Intelligence, who introduced the sharp and hierarchical division between hardware and software, and compared the human mind to an algorithmic machinea position known as "computationalism" (Dreyfus 1972;Russell and Norvig 1995;Steven 1996;Scheutz 2002;Piccinini 2012;Bermúdez 2014;Varela 2017). Biology was one of the first domains in which this informational metaphorbecome an actual metaphysicswas thoroughly applied (Oyama 2000;Atlan 2011;Longo et al 2012;Morange 2016).…”

Why post-cognitivism does not (necessarily) entail anti-computationalism

“…Putnam and Searle argued that any abstract computational description could be mapped on to any arbitrary physical system, potentially rendering the notion of computation trivial. One response to this argument was to add the additional requirement that ‘only physical states that qualify as representations may be mapped onto computational descriptions’ (Piccinini, 2012, p. 228), thus limiting the class of physical computational systems to those that are in some sense representational.…”