...What?

I'm grateful to Michael Costa for inviting Jim Fetzer to organize a symposium on whether minds are computational systems for the annual meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, Nashville, 4-7, April 1996. Thanks also to Jim Fetzer and William J. Rapaport for participating with me in that symposium. I'm indebted to to David Ferrucci, Jim Fahey, Michael Zenzen and Pat Hayes for helpful discussions prior to the SSPP meeting.

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...dead.

As will become clear below, though I agree with Fetzer that computationalism is dead on arrival because it's at odds with our life experiences, the two of us seek to impale computationalism on different sorts of experiences.

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...[11]

References to the work of Fetzer herein are mostly to [11]. I also draw heavily on [12] as well - in which also appears the ``computationalism is dead" line I find so agreeable:

If we want to understand the nature of thinking, then we have to study thought and not just the properties of formal systems. The boundaries of thought far transcend mere computability (p. 25, [12]).

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...personhood.

In my opinion some of the best of this investigation is being carried out by Bill Rapaport and John Pollock (though Pollock, at least, intends to literally build persons: [17].

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...elsewhere

See, for example, endnote 21 of [12].

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...proposition,

For example, the underlying idea is presumably that people are physically instantiated Turing machines. (Compare these machines with what Fetzer calls causal systems.)

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...numbers

A composite number is the product of two natural numbers greater than one. That is, a composite number is a non-prime other than 1 or 0. Let C denote the set of composite numbers, and set 3#3, where a string 4#4 would therefore represent the number four, and hence be a member of the language L. If restricted to determinism, accepting L would be rather complicated! But with nondeterminism available, we can quickly build a machine (call it 5#56#6) corresponding to the following procedure:

1. Nondeterministically choose two numbers p, q > 1 and transform the input into 7#7.
2. Call a ``monadic multiplier" TM so as to obtain from the result of Step 1 the string 8#8.
3. Check to see if 9#9. Halt if the lengths are equal; otherwise go into an infinite loop.

(Versions of 5#56#6 are available on my web site, ready to run in Turing's World10#10.)

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...dreams.

I think Fetzer is right that dreams are beyond the reach of mere computers - but my reasons for thinking so are different than Fetzer's. For example, since dreams involve qualia, and since (by my lights; see, e.g., Chapter 1 of my [6]) computers can't have qualia, computers can't have dreams. The story is a bit different when we consider the ``Cornish Game Clams" panels. Associationistic ``thinking" seems to me easy enough for a computer to engage in. I see no reason, in fact, why a frame-based knowledge representation and reasoning system of the sort I routinely use can't ``think" in this way, and produce text that traces the associations made. Of course, I would agree with the claim that since Professor Jimbob enjoys qualia as he associationistically thinks, what he is doing is non-computational, but this isn't Fetzer's claim.

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...detail.

I've engaged in such efforts elsewhere: [7], [3]. I've also cooked up core versions of the heart of computationalism which are as ``noncommittal" as possible, as in, for example (where Px iff x is a person and 19#19 iff x is a physical TM):

Heart of Computationalism. 20#20 x is conscious from 21#21 to 22#22, where this computation - partly determined by causal interaction with the environment - is identical to the consciousness x enjoys through 23#23

Defining computationalism via this thesis seems to provide immunity from Fetzer's objection that computationalists inclined to respond to his argument from dreams as I have end up conflating causal and computational processes. I explain why, in detail, in [4], which includes explicit definitions of `computer' and `computation.'

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...game.

Admissible question: ``What is `Hogan's dream'"? (Answer: A round of golf with a birdie on each hole.) Inadmissible: ``Is the feeling one gets from scoring an eagle on a par 5 anything like what it feels like to slam down on your car's accelerator in order to successfully avoid an accident?" Such restricted versions of 25#25 are reminiscent of the annual contest in which programs compete against each other to see which among them can fool the most humans into thinking that they (the programs) are humans.

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...beyond.

Access to info about the book in which this paper appears can be had through my web site.

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...computationalism.

This attack is in a paper I presented at the Eastern APA in 1994, and is available on my web site. A fuller version of the paper (which takes account of feedback from Searle, Dennett and others) is under review.

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...Mind.

The thought-experiment runs as follows.

As the silicon is progressively implanted into your dwindling brain, you find that the area of your conscious experience is shrinking, but that this shows no effect on your external behavior. You find, to your total amazement, that you are indeed losing control of your external behavior 38#38 [You have become blind, but] you hear your voice saying in a way that is completely out of your control `I see a red object in front of me.'38#38 We imagine that your conscious experience slowly shrinks to nothing, while your externally observable behavior remains the same. ([19], pp. 66-7)

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...support.

The book in question contains a number of other arguments for P41#41axM. For example, Chapter VIII is a sustained argument that because persons have ``free will" they can't be Turing Machines.

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...Be

In Chapter VIII of the book I try to show that a certain form of contra-causal free will implies that people, like so-called ``Zeus Machines," enter into an infinite number of states in a finite amount of time.

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...us.

It is also attractive to me because the triadic sign relation (shown in Figure 1 of Fetzer's paper) provides a framework for what logicist AI can aspire to instantiate when building agents.

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...TMs.

But see [21].

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...Holmes.

SHER-COG is intended to trigger thought about the robot COG, who Dennett and others plan on evolving into a humanoid robot [9].

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...AI.

Lest it be thought that the ratiocination of Sherlock Holmes is a phenomenon confined to the world of fiction, I direct readers to the remarkable reasoning used by Robert N. Anderson [22] to recently solve the 80 year-old mystery of what caused the fire that destroyed Jack London's ``Wolf House" in 1913. Wolf House was to be London's ``manly" residence, a 15,000 square foot structure composed of quarried volcanic rock and raw beams from ancient redwoods. The conflagration occurred just days before London was to move in, and though London vowed to rebuild, he died three years later with the house still in ruins. The sort of painstaking reasoning Anderson carried out is of a type routinely reported in newspapers. This sort of reasoning is needed nearly every time there is a plane crash, and investigators attempt to determine the cause of the tragedy.

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