Critique of computationalism

Question 1

T2-3-4 indistinguishability

Answer 1

The Turing indistinguishability:
T4: Symbolic, sensorimotor and neuromolecular indistinguishability
T3: Symbolic and sensorimotor indistinguishability
T2: Symbolic indistinguishability

Question 2

Strong AI

Answer 2

Behaves like humans

Question 3

Weak AI

Answer 3

Has some human like characteristics

Question 4

Symbol grounding problem

Answer 4

Just manipulating the symbols is not by itself enough to guarantee cognition, perception, understanding, thinking and so forth.
Insisting on implementation independence, means that you can only design T2-indistinguishable systems, which will not have intrinsic semantics and thus not reflect cognition, which seems to be about something. To get semantics, you need at least T3-indistinguishability, losing implementation independence

Question 5

Chinese room

Answer 5

He is a human being in a room and communicating but he does not know what the Chinese symbols mean

Question 6

Semantics ≠ syntax

Answer 6

Syntax does not give semantics

Question 7

Serial processing

Answer 7

Everything happens after each other

Question 8

Hardware

Answer 8

The physical thing

Question 9

Software

Answer 9

The inner thing

Question 10

Searle’s 3 axioms

Answer 10

Axiom 1: Computer programs are formal (syntactic)
Axiom 2: Human minds have mental contents (semantics)
Axiom 3: Syntax by itself is neither constitutive of nor sufficient for semantics

Question 11

Searle’s conclusion

Answer 11

Programs are neither constitutive of nor sufficient for minds

Question 12

Robot argument/reply

Answer 12

If the computer program was causally hooked up with the rest of the world, then it would acquire semantics (it would be able to ground symbols by causally interacting with the world)
Searles reply: Imagining the Chinese room inside the robot does not add semantics, even if the robot interacts with the world

Question 13

Semantics

Answer 13

The meaning of a word, phrase, or text.

Question 14

Syntax

Answer 14

The arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language.
The structure of statements in a computer language.

Question 15

Intentionalism

Answer 15

Mental states are about something

Question 16

Ground (verb)

Answer 16

To provide basis for

Question 17

The system reply

Answer 17

The room understands it
Compare with a single (language) neuron relative to the whole brain
Searles reply: Saying that the room understands Chinese is analogous to claiming that he (Searle) understands Chinese, if he memorizes all the symbols and all the rules

Question 18

The brain simulator reply

Answer 18

If the operations of the brain of a Chinese speaker were simulated, such a system would understand Chinese, just like any Chinese speaker does
We build something that is very similar to the brain structure- If we can do this there must be understanding
Searles reply: (Lau not sure what Searle means) “Computer simulations of brain processes provide models of the formal aspects of these processes. But […] [t]he computational model is no more real than the computational model of any other natural phenomenon”

Question 19

Church/Turing Thesis (CTT)

Answer 19

All independent attempts to formalize what mathematicians mean by a “computation” or an “effective procedure,” even when they have looked different on the surface, have turned out to be equivalent

Question 20

Semantic operations

Answer 20

Operations that are based on the meanings of symbols, rather than just their shapes

Question 21

Trivial computation

Answer 21

Generating uninterpretable symbol systems

Question 22

Nontrivial computation

Answer 22

The kind that can be made systematic sense of. These are the ones we are interested in

Question 23

Weak CTTP

Answer 23

Claims that every physical system is formally equivalent to a Turing Machine

Question 24

Strong CTTP

Answer 24

A plane is a computer
It is wrong or uninteresting
If every physical process is in fact computation, then the cognitive scientist might as well have ignored the computationist’s message and just kept on hunting for what the right physical process(es) might turn out to be.