Michele Pasin / Quotes

From materialism to the computational theory of mind

In the next few pages I am going to sketch briefly the history of materialism in the twentieth century, up to the point where it finally reached its most sophisticated formulation in the computational theory of the mind, the theory that the brain is a computer and the mind is a computer program.

Saved 30 July 2014 / www.amazon.com ↗

#materialism #computation #computer-program

Code is not necessarily an artifact

In the light of these observations, a code is not necessarily an artifact. If we acci- dentally delete a line of code, the result might still be a computer…

Towards An Ontology Of Software: A Requirements Engineering Perspective #code #artifacts #computer-program #program #computer-code

The invention of eliza

In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor of computer science at MIT, create, as an experiment in natural language processing, a computer program called ELIZA…

Hamlet On The Holodeck #machine #computer-program #natural-language-processing #computer-science

A complete account is more than a physical one

It should be clear that this argument simply repeats the kind of category mistake identified by Ryle. So it is true, as Swinburne says, that a physical…

The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian) #materialism #dualism #description #categories

Christians without dualist souls

Having dismissed the idea that we have immaterial souls, you might assume that there is nothing left to be said for the Christian idea of a life to come…

The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian) #Christianity #soul #dualism #materialism

Dissolving the divide between subjective and objective

But the divide between subjective and objective could also turn out to be an illusion of our own creation. This division goes to the core of our scientific…

Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) #materialism #consciousness #psychedelics #objectivity

Eliminative materialists feign anaesthesia

The first is that thoughts, feelings, emotions and so on are real. There are some ‘eliminative materialists’ who claim that they aren’t, but in I.A…

The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian) #materialism #mind #feelings