A terrific discussion of computationalism by the very excellent Marcin Miłkowski, freely available in Minds and Machines. [i]t is less misleading to think of computationalism as a diverse research tradition composed of multiple, historically variable computational theories of mind (or brain). By conflating the research tradition with one of the early theories, one could be tempted…
A discussion on the BBC World Service (H/T to David Livingston Smith). Artificial intelligenceCognitionCognitive neuroscienceCognitive sciencecomplexityPhilosophy of mind
I first came across a reference to Eugène Marais in Andries Engelbrecht’s very excellent Computational Intelligence: An Introduction. See the links below for details about this highly unusual character. The Tragic Genius of Eugène Marais (The author, Conrad Reitz, very kindly shared some of his thoughts with me). The Soul of the White Ant Introduction by Keith Addison EUGÈNE Marais was a South African…
Stanford University News New York Times I Programmer Rumelhart was enormously important in the 1980s in reviving this neural network approach to language and cognition Steven Pinker
Here’s a snappy piece by Alva Noë on man vs. machine. Is the ant smart? Or stupid? Maybe neither. Or, most intriguingly of all, maybe it is both? Is there an experimentum crucis that we might perform to settle a question like this once and for all? No. Intelligence isn’t like that. It isn’t something that…
Turing machine: this via my chum David Livingstone Smith.
Here is a superb paper by Gualtiero Piccinini that brings much needed clarity to a longstanding issue. A penultimate ms can be found here. As a consequence, when the behavior of ordinary computers is explained by program execution, the program is not just a description. The program is also a (stable state of a) physical component of…
manwithoutqualities 