Behavioural Explanation in the Realm of Non-mental Computing Agents

Abstract

Artículo de publicación ISIRecently, many philosophers have been inclined to ascribe mentality to animals (including some insects) on the main grounds that they possess certain complex computational abilities. In this paper I contend that this view is misleading, since it wrongly assumes that those computational abilities demand a psychological explanation. On the contrary, they can be just characterised from a computational level of explanation, which picks up a domain of computation and information processing that is common to many computing systems but is autonomous from the domain of psychology. Thus, I propose that it is possible to conceive insects and other animals as mere computing agents, without having any commitment to ascribe mentality to them. I conclude by sketching a proposal about how to draw the line between mere computing and genuine mentality

Do insects feel pain? A question at the intersection of animal behaviour, philosophy and robotics

“…see criteria in Tables 1 and 2 in Sneddon et al, 2014) can occur without the experience of the emotional aspect of pain (also see Aguilera, 2015). The only criteria that robots are missing (Tables 1 and 2 in Sneddon et al, 2014) are those that require an organic body (i.e.…”