Hi Gordana, Robin, John and FIS colleagues,
On 19 Nov 2012, at 14:05, Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic wrote:
Dear Joseph,
I agree with you. I am also against totalitarianism.
Computationalism is not the world, it is only a modeling framework.
It is parallel to mechanicism, but has stronger expressive power and
it has mechanicism as its proper subset.
Computationalism can certainly not exhaust all the possibilities for
us to relate to the world.
That much we must have learned from the history of science.
Nevertheless, computationalism (or info-computationalism) can be a
very useful framework
in a similar way as mechanicism was up to now perfectly fine under
certain conditions, within certain domains.
(Classical Newtonian physics is just fine in its own domain, and
relativistic corrections come first with very high velocities
while quantum mechanical modeling becomes necessary first at very
small scales.)
Info-Computationalism does not replace physics, even though there
are physicists working on the project or re-phrasing of quantum
physics
in terms of info-computation.
See Goyal and Vedral articles in
http://www.mdpi.com/journal/information/special_issues/matter
and Chiribella in
http://www.mdpi.com/journal/entropy/special_issues/unconvent_computing
We have just only started to exploit the potential of computational
framework with computing understood as natural computing
(information processing).
There exists more than one possible approach and more than one
possible framework and language for us to relate to the world.
Søren uses different framework in addressing cybersemiotic aspects.
You have logic in focus.
There is no absolute reference frame that would dictate one and only
approach. There must be place for diversity.
Hopefully all of the views will eventually be related and understood
in the common context of knowledge production
of humans and other intelligent (adaptive, learning, communicating)
agents.
All the best,
Gordana
I think that we should keep distinct two things:
1) The use of machines or computations as metaphor. Some can be good
metaphor, some can be bad. I agree with Gordana when comp refer to the
metaphors. Such metaphors can be helpful in many fields, like biology
but also physics.
2) The computationalist hypothesis in the philosophy of mind/cognitive
science (hereafter denoted by comp). This is no more metaphorical.
As I state it, the comp hypothesis is the hypothesis that there exists
a level of description of the brain (whatever needed for
consciousness, it can include the body and even some finite part of
the environment). It is not metaphorical because when you accept a
digital brain as prosthesis, you get a real thing, not a metaphor, and
you survive (comp is correct), or you don't survive (comp is false, or
the level has been wrongly chosen).
In this setting, it can be shown that NO sound machines at all can
know for sure what is her level of substitution. In fact no machine
can know which machine she is, and the choice of the substitution
level is always somehow risky. In that sense, comp warns against
taking the metaphor too much seriously, as usually the metaphor will
concern some level of description, and we can never be sure if we have
chosen the correct level.
Then the comp hypothesis has important consequences in the fundamental
realm. It makes it possible to reduce the mind body problem to the
problem of extracting the stable belief in in a physical reality from
the statistical interference of the many machine dream which exist
already in the models of elementary arithmetic. This is not well
known, but has been verified by many people, and criticized only by
sunday type of philosophy, often by people who take for granted the
existence of a *primitive* physical universe (Aristotle theology).
Let me comment also on Feynman (in The Character of Physical Law,
quoted by Gordana) :
The goal of computationalism when it comes to understanding physics
is nicely described by Feynman:
It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand
them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of
logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny
a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time. How can
all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an
infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tin piece of space/
time is going to do? So I have often made the hypothesis that
ultimately physics will not require a mathematical statement, that
in the end machinery will be revealed, and the laws will turn to be
simple, like the checker board with all its apparent complexities.
Richard Feynman in The Character of Physical Law
Since Feynman wrote this, we can say now that we know why, if comp is
correct, the physical reality, whatever it is, as to appear like that.
Indeed, anything like a physical
