Physical Computation and Cognitive Science

Abstract

About This SeriesStudies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics (SAPERE) publishes new developments and advances in all the fields of philosophy, epistemology, and ethics, bringing them together with a cluster of scientific disciplines and technological outcomes: from computer science to life sciences, from economics, law, and education to engineering, logic, and mathematics, from medicine to physics, human sciences, and politics. It aims at covering all the challenging philosophical and ethical themes of contemporary society, making them appropriately applicable to contemporary theoretical, methodological, and practical problems, impasses, controversies, and conflicts. The series includes monographs, lecture notes, selected contributions from specialized conferences and workshops as well as selected PhD theses. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. Exempted from this legal reservation are brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis or material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Duplication of this publication or parts thereof is permitted only under the provisions of the Copyright Law of the Publisher's location, in its current version, and permission for use must always be obtained from Springer. Permissions for use may be obtained through RightsLink at the Copyright Clearance Center. Violations are liable to prosecution under the respective Copyright Law. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. While the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication, neither the authors nor the editors nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for any errors or omissions that may be made. The publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein. Editorial BoardPrinted on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) To my beloved wife, Calanit, and my lovely daughters, Leah & Noa ForewordNir Fresco tackles the nontrivial question of "What is computation?". His thorough review includes explication and critique of accounts of computation ranging from Turing's, as is embodied by the Turing machine, to more recent accounts from the computational theory of mind. He offers his own account of...

Enactive autonomy in computational systems

“…This corresponds, to a large extent, to the one described by relatively recent mechanistic accounts of computation (see e.g. Miłkowski 2013;Fresco 2014;Piccinini 2015). What these accounts have in common is that they deny that computational states must be individuated according to their representational or semantic content, thus immediately removing one major objection that CE has historically held towards computationalism.…”

Probabilistic Computation and Emotion as Self-regulation

“…A taxonomy of computation in relation to cognition is provided by Fresco [12], who notes that, depending on the specific kind of "information" used, information-processing accounts of computation may differ greatly. Four main types of information in this context are given: syntactic Shannon information [30], algorithmic information [2], semantic information [1] (a case for using truth values rather than logical probability distributions is made in [11]) and finally instructional information [10,13].…”

“…It may therefore be suggested that an information-processing account that is capable of processing sub-symbolic input and producing behaviour in a probabilistic manner might be better suited for this task. Fresco [12] argues that an account based on Shannon information is better suited for probabilistic computation than one based on algorithmic information, as Shannon information is inherently statistical. The main semantic information-processing models deal with propositions rather than data, which is argued to be problematic in describing general computing systems [12].…”

“…Fresco [12] argues that an account based on Shannon information is better suited for probabilistic computation than one based on algorithmic information, as Shannon information is inherently statistical. The main semantic information-processing models deal with propositions rather than data, which is argued to be problematic in describing general computing systems [12]. Processing of instructional information [10], which informs the computing system of which among several capacities (such as addition, multiplication, etc.)…”

“…Processing of instructional information [10], which informs the computing system of which among several capacities (such as addition, multiplication, etc.) it should choose to process the data, is put forth as an alternative that satisfactorily distinguishes trivial from non-trivial computing systems [12].…”