I’m looking forward to checking out the responses you linked to.
One implication of the paper that I found interesting is that not every physical process implements every computation or even every computation of a comparable finite size. Thus, I find Chalmers’ paper to be the most satisfactory response I’ve come across to Greg Egan’s Dust Theory, previously discussed on lw here. (As others have anticipated though, you do need to grant a coherent and not-too-liberal notion of reliable causation, but we seem to have ample evidence for that.)
For many scientific interests, I agree that it may not be necessary to describe or conceive of the mind in these computational terms. But if one is engaged in a grand reductionist project comparable to reducing neuropsychology to molecular biology to atomic theory, then, well, it helps to have the equivalent of a precise atomic theory to reduce to. For the purposes of my philosophical research, I’m reducing metaethics to facts about the cognitive architecture of our decision algorithms, which in turn are reduced to certain kinds of instantiated computations, which are reduced a la Chalmers to physical processes, which I take to be modelled by Pearl style causal models allowing us to be otherwise agnostic about the level of explanation.
I’m looking forward to checking out the responses you linked to.
One implication of the paper that I found interesting is that not every physical process implements every computation or even every computation of a comparable finite size. Thus, I find Chalmers’ paper to be the most satisfactory response I’ve come across to Greg Egan’s Dust Theory, previously discussed on lw here. (As others have anticipated though, you do need to grant a coherent and not-too-liberal notion of reliable causation, but we seem to have ample evidence for that.)
For many scientific interests, I agree that it may not be necessary to describe or conceive of the mind in these computational terms. But if one is engaged in a grand reductionist project comparable to reducing neuropsychology to molecular biology to atomic theory, then, well, it helps to have the equivalent of a precise atomic theory to reduce to. For the purposes of my philosophical research, I’m reducing metaethics to facts about the cognitive architecture of our decision algorithms, which in turn are reduced to certain kinds of instantiated computations, which are reduced a la Chalmers to physical processes, which I take to be modelled by Pearl style causal models allowing us to be otherwise agnostic about the level of explanation.