You're right that I was being intentionally vague. For what it's worth, I was trying to drop some hints targeted at some who might be particularly helpful. If you didn't notice them, I wouldn't worry about it. This is especially true if we haven't met in person and you don't know much about me or my situation.
A Computational Foundation for the Study of Cognition by David Chalmers
Abstract from the paper:
... (read more)Computation is central to the foundations of modern cognitive science, but its role is controversial. Questions about computation abound: What is it for a physical system to implement a computation? Is computation sufficient for thought? What is the role of computation in a theory of cognition? What is the relation between different sorts of computational theory, such as connectionism and symbolic computation? In this paper I develop a systematic framework that addresses all of these questions.
Justifying the role of computation requires analysis of implementation, the nexus between abstract computations and concrete physical systems. I give such an analysis, based
Hi everyone!
I'm John Ku. I've been lurking on lesswrong since its beginning. I've also been following MIRI since around 2006 and attended the first CFAR mini-camp.
I became very interested in traditional rationality when I used analytic philosophy to think my way out of a very religious upbringing in what many would consider to be a cult. After I became an atheist, I set about rebuilding my worldview and focusing especially on metaethics to figure out what remains of ethics without God.
This process landed me in University of Michigan's Philosophy PhD program, during which time I read Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near. This struck me as very important and I quickly followed a... (read more)
I apologize for the embarrassing amount of time it has taken to respond to this. This was posted before the negotiations were actually finalized, which took some number of weeks. Then, in a matter of months, I ended up returning all of the equity in exchange for a computer and waived referral fee. At this point, I assume any further details are a moot point.
You're right that Putnam's point is stronger than what I initially made it out to be, but I think my broader point still holds.
I was trying to avoid this complication but with two-dimensional semantics, we can disambiguate further and distinguish between the C-intension and the A-intension (again see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article for explanation). What I should have said is that while it makes sense to be externalist about extensions and C-intensions, we can still be internalist about A-intensions.
I think many of the other commenters have done an admirable job defending Putnam's usage of thought experiments, so I don't feel a need to address that.
However, there also seems to be some confusion about Putnam's conclusion that "meaning ain't in the head." It seems to me that this confusion can be resolved by disambiguating the meaning of 'meaning'. 'Meaning' can refer to either the extension (i.e. referent) of a concept or its intension (a function from the context and circumstance of a concept's usage to its extension). The extension clearly "ain't in the head" but the intension is.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Two-Dimensional Semantics has a good explanation of my usage of the terms 'intension' and 'extension'. Incidentally, as someone with a lot of background in academic philosophy, I think making two-dimensional semantics a part of LessWrong's common background knowledge would greatly improve the level of philosophical discussion here as well as reduce the inferential distance between LessWrong and academic philosophers.
If the difficulty of a physiological problem is mathematical in essence, ten physiologists ignorant of mathematics will get precisely as far as one physiologist ignorant of mathematics and no further.
Norbert Wiener
I'm looking forward to checking out the responses you linked to.
One implication of the paper that I found interesting is that not every physical process implements every computation or even every computation of a comparable finite size. Thus, I find Chalmers' paper to be the most satisfactory response I've come across to Greg Egan's Dust Theory, previously discussed on lw here. (As others have anticipated though, you do need to grant a coherent and not-too-liberal notion of reliable causation, but we seem to have ample evidence for that.)
For many scientific interests, I agree that it may not be necessary to describe or conceive of the mind in these computational terms. But if... (read more)