Re: What Computationalism is and what it is *not*

[Bruno Marchal]

On 03 Sep 2005, at 20:54, Hal Finney wrote: Okay, I was mostly trying to clarify the terminology.  The problem is that sometimes you use "comp" as if it is the same as computationalism, and sometimes it seems to include these additional concepts of the Church Thesis and Arithmetical Realism.  Maybe you should come up with a new word for the combination of comp (aka "Yes Doctor") + CT + AR.  Then you could make it clear when you are just talking about computationalism, and when you are including the additional concepts. I will think about it, but I do think that CT and AR are just making the YD more precise. Also everybody in cognitive science agree explicitly or implicitly with both CT and AR, so to take them away from YD could be more confusing. Would I meet a computationalist supporting explicitly some negation of CT or AR, I think it is up to him to make that clear because by default CT and AR are accepted. It is just that my conclusion are "enormous" so that I make the assumptions explicit. But actually I have never met someone against CT and AR, at least before I try to communicate the argument. Too much vocabulary can also be confusing. But I will think about it. I use "comp" since 1998. Before, I was using instead "indexical digital mechanism" (indexical for the "I" in "I am a machine" or "I say yes to the doctor"). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/