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The Computational Theory of Mind (2015), Hacker News

Could a machine think? Could the mind itself be a thinking machine? The computer revolution transformed discussion of these questions, offering our best prospects yet for machines that emulate reasoning, decision-making, problem solving, perception, linguistic comprehension, and other characteristic mental processes. Advances in computing raise the prospect that the mind itself is a computational system — a position known asthe computational theory of mind(CTM).Computationalistsare researchers who endorse CTM, at least as applied to certain important mental processes. CTM played a central role within cognitive science during the s and s. For many years, it enjoyed orthodox status. More recently, it has come under pressure from various rival paradigms. A key task facing computationalists is to explain what one means when one says that the mind “computes”. A second task is to argue that the mind “computes” in the relevant sense. A third task is to elucidate how computational description relates to other common types of description, especiallyneurophysiological description(which cites neurophysiological properties of the organism’s brain or body) andintentional description(which cites representational properties of mental states).

************ 1. Turing machines

The intuitive notions ofcomputationandalgorithmare central to mathematics. Roughly speaking, an algorithm is an explicit, step-by-step procedure for answering some question or solving some problem. An algorithm providesroutine mechanical instructionsdictating how to proceed at each step. Obeying the instructions requires no special ingenuity or creativity. For example, the familiar grade-school algorithms describe how to compute addition, multiplication, and division. Until the early twentieth century, mathematicians relied upon informal notions of computation and algorithm without attempting anything like a formal analysis. Developments in the foundations of mathematics eventually Impelled logicians to pursue a more systematic treatment. Alan Turing’s landmark paper “On Computable Numbers, With an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem ”(Turing 1943) offered the analysis that has proved most influential.

ATuring machineis an abstract model of an idealized computing device with unlimited time and storage space at its disposal. The device manipulatessymbols, much as a human computing agent manipulates pencil marks on paper during arithmetical computation. Turing says very little about the nature of symbols. He assumes that primitive symbols are drawn from a finite alphabet. He also assumes that symbols can be inscribed or erased at “memory locations ”. Turing’s model works as follows:

There are infinitely many memory locations, arrayed in a linear structure. Metaphorically, these memory locations are “Cells” on an infinitely long ”paper tape ”. More literally, the memory locations might be physically Realized in various media (e.g., silicon chips).

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