Marcin Milkowski, “Explaining the Computational Mind” (MIT Press, 2013)
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What is the central thesis of Marcin Milkowski’s “Explaining the Computational Mind”?
Hello, and welcome to New Books in Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor of the University of Iowa, and I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talise of Vanderbilt University. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, and many other areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Martin Mukowski, assistant professor of philosophy at the The Institute of Philosophy of Mind of the Polish Academy of Sciences. His new book, Explaining the Computational Mind, is just out from the MIT Press. The computational theory of mind has its roots in Alan Turn's development of the basic ideas behind computer programming.
specifically the manipulation of symbols according to rules. That idea has been elaborated since in a number of very different ways, but in some form it remains at the core of the cognitive sciences today. In explaining the computational mind, Mukowski defends a minimalist view of computationalism as information processing, with the intention of providing a general view of computational explanation that is intended to cover all the specific forms in which information processing explanations appear. On Milkowski's view, Jerry Fodor's slogan that there is no computation without representation should be replaced by replaced with the claim that there is no representation without computation, and David Marr's computational, algorithmic and implementation levels for describing complex systems should be replaced by talk of different compositional levels in a mechanistic explanation.
Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Martin Mukowski. Uh hi, welcome to New Books in Philosophy.
I'm delighted to talk to you today.
I'm very pleased to be talking with you about your new book, um, Explaining the Computational Mind from from MIT Press. Um Uh so let me just to you know start us off uh with a little bit of the the background of the book. Um uh maybe you could tell us a little bit about about yourself um and how you got to philosophy and your your interest in this in this area of philosophy and how how you came to write this particular book.
Well basically my interest in philosophy started with literature. Uh in high school I started to read Umberto Echo and uh Thomas Finchon and that got me interested in the discussions over those books. And the discussions were not really about literature, they were they were about philosophy. So when I went to the University of Warsaw It was just natural to um uh enroll to philosophy courses and to start uh thinking about those things. And then of course it became uh an interest in itself. But actually At first I thought that'd be uh uh doing history of philosophy, especially German philosophy. But uh simply uh a year in Berlin Um made me uh someone who's really not into that. because it turned out that people were interested in small details and not about not in arguments that
Those German philosophers have. So I went back and I thought if I want to write a PhD in philosophy, it has to be about something Which is really connected with current science and with arguments. And that started me thinking about writing a PhD about Uh, Dan Dennis. Philosophy of mind. And since he's a A defender or computational theory of mind. Uh well That got me interested. And at the same time I did a lot of translations about uh і т computers, things like that for major companies, and I did some small artificial intelligence projects projects and Well That got me Some more into that. So basically my interest in AI. was growing uh stronger and that was converging with my interest in philosophy. So I think that is the major reason why I got interested in the field.
And that was the basic А резен вай сам. Eight or ten years ago I started to think about computational theory of mind.
So with that which is basically um I mean all of all of what you said in terms of artificial intelligence and IT, that is all uh very much in the the history of of the computational theory.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the central thesis of Marcin Milkowski’s “Explaining the Computational Mind”?
0:07–14:00
2
How does Milkowski describe his personal journey into philosophy and computational theory?
14:00–26:09
3
What does Milkowski mean by defining computation as minimal information‑processing rather than rule‑based symbol manipulation?
26:09–40:19
4
Which four illustrative computational models does the book use and why are they important?
40:19–54:47
5
How does Milkowski distinguish between information and representation, and why does he claim “no representation without computation”?
54:47–1:06:46
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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