Mazviita Chirimuuta

whether it's my stomach as opposed to my brain.

And so that's a challenge to the computational theory of mind, that it's assuming that brains implement computations just because we can sort of model them computationally, but we can model all kinds of things computationally.

What makes brains special?

I don't think it does.

So computation itself is mathematical formalism.

It is a mathematical structure.

Things that have causal powers are concrete physical systems.

So I just think they're different kinds of things.

Yeah, I mean, I think it just goes back to this issue, like computation in and of itself is not the kind of thing that could have causal powers.

I think Sol's point, and this is in the rediscovery of mind on this, was an interesting one.

It was kind of maybe kind of subtle and it kind of gets lost in the wash of like AI back and forth and Sol bashing, which happens a lot.

But...

It was about the kinds of ways that we form explanation in the sciences.

And his point was that cognition, if it's anything, is something as part of the physical realm, the realm of causation.

The assumption of the computational theory of mind and he argues that this is very dominant within cognitive science is that you can explain this phenomenon which is a phenomenon of the concrete physical world through this non-causal thing which is computation and suddenly there's no gap that needs to be closed.

And I think that's a fair point, is that there's something inherently that needs further justification of why of all of the things that happen in the concrete physical world that demand explanation, why we reach outside of the concrete realm of physical causation into computation in order to explain this thing, cognition.

What do I think?

I think certainly there's more to human understanding than that.

I think that...

A thing about human cognition and animal cognition in general is that my view is that it's not a set of discrete modules that work separately from one another.