Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Rather, the mind is said to embrace subsystems dedicated to particular kinds of reasoning or goals (pp. 27–31).

The organs of computation that make up the human mind are not tailored to solve arbitrary computational problems but only those that increased the reproductive chances of our ancestors living as foragers in pre-state societies.

In the same way, the idea that the human mind is an evolved computer aims to bridge the last major chasm in human knowledge, that between matter and mind, biology and culture, nature and society, the natural sciences and the humanities.

This consilience promises not only a more parsimonious metaphysics but greater depth and explanatory power for the disciplines that study the mind and its products.

The Concept of Computation in The Mind Doesn’t Work that Way In TMDWTW, Fodor argues that he never meant that all of the mind could be explained as a kind of computation.

On the contrary, there is a key thing that a human mind can do but which a computational system cannot do. I will discuss this allegedly special human feat soon, but the debate cannot proceed if HTMW and TMDWTW don?t mean the same thing by the word ?computation?.

He now defines the Computational Theory of Mind as ‘whether the architecture of (human) cognition is interestingly like the architecture of Turing’s kind of computer’ (p. 105, note 3).

Similarly, he evaluates the idea that ‘cognitive architecture is Classical Turing architecture; that is, that the mind is interestingly like a Turing machine’ (p.

It was invented only as a convenient mathematical construction, not as a prototype for a workable computer, and certainly not as a model of the functioning of the human mind.

No one has ever taken seriously the idea that ‘cognitive architecture is Classical Turing architecture’, so the central premise of TMDWTW—that a Turing Machine is unsuited to solve a certain kind of problem that the human mind easily solves—is not relevant to anything.