poke comments on Thou Art Physics - Less Wrong

40 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 June 2008 06:37AM

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Comment author: poke 07 June 2008 11:48:00PM 1 point [-]

mtraven, The computer started as an attempt to mechanize calculation. There's a tradition in mathematics, going back to the Greeks and popular with mathematicians, that mathematics is exemplary reasoning. It's likely that identifying computation and thought builds off that. If calculation/mathematics is exemplary thought and computers mechanize calculation then computers mechanize thought.

I would argue instead that mathematics is actually exemplary (albeit creative) tool-use. This is especially stark if you look at the original human computers Caledonian mentioned: they worked from rules and lacked knowledge of the overall calculation they were taking part in. I think computers mechanized precisely what they mechanized and nothing more: the calculation and not the person performing it.

I disagree that it's our best model; I find it too misleading. I think you identify why it's popular though: computationalism lets us sneak dualism through the back door. Supposedly one can now be a materialist and hold that the mind is software instantiated on the hardware of the brain. That's an extremely useful premise if you're a philosopher or a psychologist who doesn't want to crack open a biology textbook. Also, the evidence that the brain engages in symbol processing is very weak, so I don't think it's necessary to invoke computationalism there.

I don't mean to imply that computer science only applies to computers though. We can apply the tools of computer science to the real world. We can talk about the computational limits of physical systems and so forth.