Recently, Massimo Pigliucci hosted a discussion of the computational theory of mind on his Rational Speaking podcast, with an accompanying post on his blog:
That blog post has a link to the podcast. I listened to that podcast this morning, and will comment on it in this post.
I have been clear that I am skeptical of computationalism. And Pigliucci is equally clear that he, too, is a skeptic. But I don’t plan to repeat those earlier posts here.
Analog computation
What surprised me about the discussion, was that O’Brien emphasized analog computation. Perhaps O’Brien is conceding that there might be problems with computationalism in the form of digital computation.
I remember, perhaps around 15 years ago, somebody argued for analog computation rather than digital computation. This was in a usenet post, and possibly the poster was Stefan Harnad. I remember, at the time, that my response was something like:
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The Heretical Philosopher 