poke, thanks for the serious reply. You’ve redeemed the conversation for me.
Here’s my view of computationalism: the computer is a highly imperfect model of human thought. If you look at the historical development of the computer, it evolved as an attempt to mechanize thought. Despite its imperfections, it’s the best model we have, and it helps us understand real brains. Various insoluble philosophical problems appear in the computer as engineering problems, which does not exactly solve the real problems but helps get a better handle on them.
For instance, the old problem of mind/body dualism was recreated in the computer and appears as the less mysterious hardware/software dualism. Suddenly we have a model for how physical systems and symbolic systems can depend on and interact with each other. That’s very powerful. But I don’t believe (as some of the more callow reductionists do) that we have thereby completely solved or gotten rid of the original question.
poke, thanks for the serious reply. You’ve redeemed the conversation for me.
Here’s my view of computationalism: the computer is a highly imperfect model of human thought. If you look at the historical development of the computer, it evolved as an attempt to mechanize thought. Despite its imperfections, it’s the best model we have, and it helps us understand real brains. Various insoluble philosophical problems appear in the computer as engineering problems, which does not exactly solve the real problems but helps get a better handle on them.
For instance, the old problem of mind/body dualism was recreated in the computer and appears as the less mysterious hardware/software dualism. Suddenly we have a model for how physical systems and symbolic systems can depend on and interact with each other. That’s very powerful. But I don’t believe (as some of the more callow reductionists do) that we have thereby completely solved or gotten rid of the original question.