The Mind as Neural Software? Understanding Functionalism, Computationalism, and Computational Functionalism

Piccinini, Gualtiero

doi:10.2139/ssrn.1596327

Cited by 14 publications

(19 citation statements)

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“…The version herein is significantly expanded and strengthened and also rebuts several additional objections. 7 Along with terms like 'function' and 'computation', 'algorithm' has been used in various senses; unfortunately, the result has often been confusion rather than gains in expressive power (Piccinini 2004(Piccinini , 2010. 8 See, e.g., Frixione (2001).…”

Section: The Wrong Way To Cope With Intractabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Consequently, we assume that psychological explanations of these capacities are typically a subclass of mechanistic explanations (note that it does not follow that all psychological explanation just is mechanistic explanation (see Piccinini 2004;Wright and Bechtel 2007;Bechtel and Wright 2009)). We will also assume that norms of descriptive adequacy and completeness dictate that the functional characterization of a given φ requires an explanation of how it is computed; but see Piccinini (2010) for an argument that functionalism and computationalism are disjoint theses. 2 In the theory of computation, functions are often also referred to as '(computational) problems' (cf.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Intractability and the use of heuristics in psychological explanations

2010

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Many cognitive scientists, having discovered that some computationallevel characterization f of a cognitive capacity φ is intractable, invoke heuristics as algorithmic-level explanations of how cognizers compute f . We argue that such explanations are actually dysfunctional, and rebut five possible objections. We then propose computational-level theory revision as a principled and workable alternative.

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Section: The Wrong Way To Cope With Intractabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intractability and the use of heuristics in psychological explanations

2010

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“…And how may critical vulnerabilities emerge? Section 2 takes a history of mind perspective, but also reviews some salient characteristics of the brain, which may be viewed as the hardware of the mind [79,80]. Section 3 deals with the history of digital technology.…”

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confidence: 99%

Sustainable Digital Environments: What Major Challenges Is Humankind Facing?

Scholz

2016

Sustainability

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This paper identifies and discusses the benefits, threats, and vulnerabilities related to the digital revolution. It aims to motivate research and its funding regarding digital threats and vulnerabilities related, in particular, to anticipating unintended, undesirable rebound effects, tipping points, critically fast evolutionary change rates, trade-offs, etc. A brief analysis of the history of the mind and technology reveals slow technological development over tens of thousands of years (including the invention of a place-value digital number system). Then, a small series of groundbreaking ideas (e.g., binary logic, Shannon's symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits, architectures of computing) enabled the industry-driven invention of programmable computing machines. Ultimately, the mastery of electron and semiconductor physics allowed for economical and seemingly unlimited storage capacity that made digital tools available to all domains of society. Based on the historical analysis, a coupled human-environment systems perspective (that includes a hierarchy assumption ranging from the human cell to the human species) enables the identification of several potential challenges to society and science. First, digital nano-engineering promotes genetic modifications (i.e., directed evolution), and synthetic biology enables a new level of the appropriation of nature. The understanding of cell-based biocomputers may call for new forms of logic. These and other challenges require thorough sustainability research in order to anticipate major changes on all levels of human systems. Second, the human individual is exposed to new forms of vulnerability. In particular, the potential epigenetic effects resulting from the excessive use of digital information of historically unknown speed, density, and contents and the loss of (the Western common-law right to) privacy resulting from big data (whose ownership is often unknown) should become subjects of research. Third, digital technologies are responsible for rapid changes in all social and economic structures. The paper suggests that thorough, discipline-based interdisciplinary research is needed in order to develop basic knowledge for creating and managing resilient relationships between human systems and their digital environments.Keywords: digital revolution; digital threats; rebound effects; genetically modified organisms (GMO); cell-based computers; cell-based computing; environmental epigenetics; loss of privacy; appropriation of nature Why Do Digital Environments Call for Special Attention? The Social Dimension of the Digital Revolution Is Not Yet Well UnderstoodThe development of Homo sapiens and human societies is characterized by a couple of fundamental transitions. The present paper starts from the proposition that, phylogenetically and historically, many impacts linked to the emergence of digital environments (E D ) have the same gravity as the mastery of fire, the development of speech, the invention of agrotechnology, and the Industrial Revolutio...

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“…In lieu of these traditional accounts, we will present a general account of computation and information processing that systematizes, refines, and extends our previous work [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37].…”

Section: Information Processing Computation and The Foundations Of mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We reject this interpretational pancomputationalism because it conflates computational modeling with computational explanation. The computational theory of cognition is not limited to the claim that cognition can be described (modeled) computationally, as the weather can; it adds that cognitive phenomena have a computational explanation [28,31,34]. Other authors defend (5) by arguing that the universe as a whole is at bottom computational [56,57].…”

Section: Getting Rid Of Some Mythsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Information Processing, Computation, and Cognition

Piccinini

Scarantino

2010

SSRN Journal

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This is a preprint of an article whose final and definitive form will be published in Journal of Biological Physics; Journal of Biological Physics is available online at: http://www.springerlink.com/content/102921/ Abstract:Computation and information processing are among the most fundamental notions in cognitive science. They are also among the most imprecisely discussed. Many cognitive scientists take it for granted that cognition involves computation, information processing, or both -although others disagree vehemently. Yet different cognitive scientists use 'computation' and 'information processing' to mean different things, sometimes without realizing that they do. In addition, computation and information processing are surrounded by several myths; first and foremost, that they are the same thing. In this paper, we address this unsatisfactory state of affairs by presenting a general and theory-neutral account of computation and information processing. We also apply our framework by analyzing the relations between computation and information processing on one hand and classicism and connectionism/computational neuroscience on the other. We defend the relevance to cognitive science of both computation, at least in a generic sense, and information processing, in three important senses of the term. Our account advances several foundational debates in cognitive science by untangling some of their conceptual knots in a theory-neutral way. By leveling the playing field, we pave the way for the future resolution of the debates' empirical aspects.

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The Mind as Neural Software? Understanding Functionalism, Computationalism, and Computational Functionalism

Cited by 14 publications

References 118 publications

Intractability and the use of heuristics in psychological explanations

Intractability and the use of heuristics in psychological explanations

Sustainable Digital Environments: What Major Challenges Is Humankind Facing?

Information Processing, Computation, and Cognition

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