We are left to heuristically search for better non-deterministic heuristics.ģ. If we cannot brute force mathematics, why would we think that we could brute force the empirical world? Even if we could, there is not enough time nor enough resources. Yes, mathematics does involve applying deterministic rules to calculate guaranteed results to well defined problems, but how do you think it finds these rules? Mathematicians search for well-formed proofs in a non-totalisable space of possible syntactic objects. Why would we model other creativity this way? Furthermore, it’s a creativity that in principle cannot be modelled on brute forcing. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, what Gödel proves is that even mathematics is essentially creative, rather than mechanically deductive. Indeed, it is an evolving collection of these. Any system that learns, which means everything system that is truly intelligent, requires essentially fallible ways of doing the latter. Some problems are solved by following rules, but others can only be solved by finding rules. The deep point is that any heuristic that searches a possibility space for a solution needs this. This non-determinism can be conceived in various ways, in terms of exploitation of environmental randomness, or in terms of probabilistic transition systems (e.g., Markov chains). It is precisely what undermines the Leibnizian Myth of mechanical deduction. When it comes to the human brain, this is just factually true, but I think a case can be made that this is true of anything worth calling a mind. So much of classical computationalism works by modelling the mind on Turing machines, or worse, straight up computable functions, and so implicitly framing it as something that takes finite input and produces finite output (whose parameters must be defined in advance).Įveryone who treats computation as a matter of symbol manipulation, both pro-CCTM (Fodor) and anti-CCTM (Searle), has framed the issue in a way that leads directly to misunderstanding this fairly simple, and completely crucial point.Ģ. This is a very technical point, but it has fairly serious philosophical implications. Interestingly enough, this means that the information flowing into and out of the mind, forming cybernetic feedback loops mediated by the environment, is not data, but co-data. It is an online system that takes in input and produces output in a manner that is not guaranteed to terminate, and which for the most part has control mechanisms that prevent it behaving badly (e.g., catastrophic divergence). (If you want an example of this folk wisdom turning up in philosophy, go read Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which contains some real corkers.)Īnyway, here are some reasonable assumptions about any account of the mind as a computational process:ġ. Instead, they have a sort of quasi-Leibnizian folk wisdom about ‘mechanical deduction’. What this question reveals about those who ask it and those who entertain it is that they don’t really appreciate the relationship between computation and logic. The correct response to this is: “Why in the ever-loving fuck would you think that the brain qua computational process could be modelled by a process of deduction in a fixed proof system with fixed premises?” However, in my view, the biggest problem with first and second generation computationalists is a too narrow view of what computation is.Ĭonsider this old chestnut: “Gödel shows us that the mind cannot be a computer, because we can intuit mathematical truths that cannot be deduced from a given set of axioms!”
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There are many complaints made about classical computational theory of mind (CCTM), but few of them come from the side of computer science.
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There are a lot of nuances hidden in how we define the terms ‘computation’, ‘ information‘, and ‘representation’, if we’re to deploy them in resolving the traditional philosophical problems of mindedness, but these nuances will have to wait for another day. I’m still not entirely happy with the arguments sketched here, but it’s a good introduction to the way I think we should articulate the relationship between philosophy of mind and computer science. Here’s a thread from the end of last year trying to reframe the core question of the computational theory of mind. RT cat_acheson: Sharing this with permission from my friend Jen, who was arrested in her home a couple of days ago. RT likeminds_camp: Likeminds 6.0 August 26-28 speaker sessions with mayaonthenet & deontologistics music by wet & dossxoxo tickets on… 2 days ago I really miss when there was more on my timeline than just the tweets Twitter thinks I want to see, if for no other… /i/web/status/1… 1 day ago