Gualtiero Piccinini, “Physical Computation: A Mechanistic Account” (Oxford UP, 2016)
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What is the overall purpose of the interview and how is the book introduced?
Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdur, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co host of the channel along with Robert Talise, professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Together we renewed conversations with philosophers about their new books, drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Waltiero Piccionini, who's professor of philosophy at the University of Missouri at Saint Louis. His new book Physical Computation, a mechanistic account, is just out from Oxford University Press. A popular way of thinking about the mind and its relation to the brain or to physical bodies generally is
is in terms of the mind as a computer that processes information. But this general approach to solving the mind body problem admits of a number of different and often incompatible elaborations. In his new book, Piccinini integrates philosophical and empirical work in mechanistic and psychological explanation and computabil computability theory, among others, to provide a detailed mechanistic account of the sense in which some physical systems compute, many others do not, and that much of what computing systems do does not count as computing and He breaks with a number of dominant views, arguing that functional analyses of the mind are sketches of physical mechanisms, but he also says that the mind is not thereby reduced to physical mechanisms.
He also holds that physical computation is not defined in semantic terms, that one can elaborate or individuate the the natures of the vehicles of computation without reference to their representational properties. Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Well Piro. Are you there? Hi, Carrie. Hi. Uh welcome to New Books in Philosophy. Thank you for having me.
How does Piccinini describe his academic background and the genesis of *Physical Computation*?
I'm very excited to be talking about your new book, Physical Computation, a mechanistic account, which integrates a number of different themes that you've been working on for a a number of years in in computability theory and mechanisms and functional analysis and the syntax semantics distinction and its role in information processing and of course the notion of information and information processing itself. Before we get into the details of your account of of physical computation Uh could you say a bit about your uh background as a as a philosopher and the uh the genesis of this book?
Sure. Uh I studied philosophy and cognitive science as an undergrad and I ran into this debate on the foundations of cognitive science About whether the brain is a computer and what does that mean? And I realized that Many cognitive scientists say the brain is a computer, but they don't necessarily know what that's supposed to mean. And many philosophers have all kinds of opinions about this too. But they also uh didn't base their arguments so much on What we know about computation from computer science and computability theory uh but rather on thought experiments and intuitions that they form in some In some way. And so And so I thought, Well, there's room here for somebody to look more carefully at the science of computation and see what
We can learn from that, um, about what physical computation is. And so I did that in my dissertation. And then from the dissertation I wrote a bunch of articles, and then from those articles You know, I ca I kept writing more articles and more articles and finally I thought, Oh, I should For all this. uh material together. So that it's all in one place and it's all consistent and Meanwhile I had changed my mind about a whole bunch of things, so Um so that's the book. It's my more mature view about physical computation.
Okay. Um so yeah, th it is it's it's quite a package. I mean there's a lot that's that's put together here, a lot of a lot of interesting parts, some of which are very much against uh certain dominant views of at least the way the relation between uh you know, mind and body or in this particular case the broadly speaking, the computer model of the brain, as you mentioned before.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the overall purpose of the interview and how is the book introduced?
0:07–2:05
2
How does Piccinini describe his academic background and the genesis of *Physical Computation*?
2:05–10:22
3
What is Piccinini’s mechanistic definition of a physical computing system?
10:22–19:54
4
How does the book treat the role of “vehicles” and why are they not defined semantically?
19:54–29:15
5
What are the two notions of function discussed and how do they apply to computing systems?
29:15–38:03
6
Why does Piccinini reject strong autonomy while endorsing medium‑independence and multiple realizability?
38:03–45:31
7
What is the scope of the account—what counts as a physical computer and what doesn’t?
45:31–53:49
8
How does the modest physical Church‑Turing thesis limit what counts as computation, and what are Piccinini’s future research plans?
53:49–1:04:03
Speakers
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