I'm not sure the implementation details are particularly relevant to his main argument though. The central concern is that computation is step-wise whereas dynamicism is continuous in time. So a computational approach, by definition, will break a task into a sequence of steps and these have an order but not an inherent time-scale. (It's hard to see how an approach would be computationalist at all if this were not the case.) This has consequences for typical LessWrong theses. For example, speeding up the substrate for a computation has an obvious result: each step will be executed faster. If we have a computation consisting of three steps, S1 -> S2 -> S3, and each one takes 10 ms and we speed it up by a factor of 10 we'll have a computation that executes in 3 ms instead of 30 ms. But if we have a dynamical equation describing the system this isn't the case. I can speak of the system moving between states - say, S(t) -> S(t+1) - but if we speed up the components involved by 10x (say, these are neural states, and we're speeding up the neurons) I don't get the same thing but faster, I get something else entirely. Perhaps the result would be greater sensitivity to shorter time-scales but given that the brain is likely temporally organised I'm inclined to think what I'd get would be a brain that doesn't work at all.
See, this is why I make LW discussion posts asking where I need to say "oops." :)
I encountered dynamical systems when I read my first cogsci textbook, and was probably too influenced by its take on dynamical systems. Here's what Bermudez writes on pages 429-430:
...We started out... with the idea that the dynamical systems approach might be a radical alternative to some of the basic assumptions of cognitive science — and in particular to the idea that cognition essentially involves computation and information processing. Some proponents of the dyna
Eliezer once told me:
If there's one rationality skill I like to think I'm pretty good at, it's this one: the skill of saying "Oops."
In fact, I say "Oops, fixed, thanks" so often on Less Wrong I once suggested I should have a shortcut for it: "OFT."
And I don't just say "oops" for typos and mistakes in tone, but also for mistakes in my facts and arguments.
It's not that I say "oops" every time I'm challenged at length, either. I don't say "oops" until I actually think I was significantly wrong; otherwise, I stand my ground and ask for better counter-arguments.
But I'm sure I can improve.
Wanna help me debug my own mind?
Tell me: On which issues do you think I most obviously still need to say "Oops"?