<regrettable snips to get at the heart of it. One thing at a time. Hope
you don't mind.>
russell standish wrote:
> Nobody is suggesting that brains are Turing machines. All that is
> being suggested (by COMP) is that brains perform computations (and
> nothing but), hence can be perfectly emulated by a Turing machine, by
> virtue of the Church-Turing thesis.
>
"/Nobody is suggesting that brains are Turing machines./ "
_Yes they are_- /implicitly/ in an expectation that a computation of a
model of the appearances of a brain can be a brain (below). To see
this...note that you said:
.... "That brains perform computations.....hence can be perfectly
emulated etc etc"
Brains are a naturally evolving self-manipulating natural process that involves natural symbols going through continual transformations in regular ways. //
And...yes....we can construct a _/model/_ X of the appearances that brain has whilst that manipulation/transformation is underway....
but...so what?
There is /nowhere in the universe that model X is being "computed" on anything _in the sense we understand as a Turing machine_./ (This applies to models of cognition and to models of the material/space of the brain.) This is the false assumption. The C-T thesis is not wrong. /It's just not saying anything/. The 'emulation' you cite is only ever justified as of a model of a cognitive process, /not a cognitive process/. This is precisely the conflation of (a) "/the natural world as some kind of as-yet un-elaborated natural computation/" with (b) "/Turing-style computation of a _model_ of the natural world/".
The COMP I refute in the paper is exactly this (b) kind:
*COMP*
This is the shorthand for computationalism as distilled from the various
sources cited above. The working definition here:
"/The operational/functional equivalence (identity, indistinguishability
at the level of the model) of (a) a sufficiently embodied,
computationally processed, sufficiently detailed symbolic/formal
description/model of a natural thing X and (b) the described natural
thing X/"/./
There is a fundamental logical error being made of the kind: "/natural
thing X behaves as if
abstract-scientific-formal-description is running as a program on a
computer, so therefore all abstract/artificial
//computations-of-formal-description//-X are (by an undisclosed,
undiscussed mechanism) identical to natural thing X/".
//
Do you see how the C-T Thesis and the Turing machine ideas can be
perfectly right and at the same time deliver absolutely no claim to be
involved in or describing the origins of an actual natural cognitive
process?
So when you say "Nobody is suggesting that brains are Turing machines" - _this cannot be true_, because everyone is methodologically behaving as if they had. It's an act of supposition/omission ....a failure to properly distinguish two kinds of things. There are other options which do not make this presupposition, and which are therefore better justified as forming descriptive framework which might involve understanding /actual cognition/ instead of assuming its origins. I have been exploring these 'other options' for a long time. Their details don't matter - the very fact of the possibility is what is important - and what has been tacitly presumed out of existence by the conflation I have delineated.
Our failure to consider these other options is a subscription to the conflation I have elaborated.
This is the true heart of the matter.
We have been rattling off paragraphs like the one you delivered above for so long that we fail to see the implicit epistemic poison of the unjustified claim hidden inside.
colin
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Received on Mon Aug 10 2009 - 14:59:08 PDT