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From: stevens@prodigal.psych.rochester.edu (Greg Stevens)
Subject: Re: Thought Question
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In <3eh97p$8oh@agate.berkeley.edu> <jerrybro@uclink2.berkeley.edu> writes:
>rickert@cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) wrote:

>> The question about cognition, then, is not
>> whether the brain is in fact doing computation, but whether it is
>> useful to interpret the brain as doing computation.

>Exactly.  And my opinion is that it is not obvious that in
>interpreting the brain as doing computation we are fully 
>capturing the activity of the brain.  For example, I think that
>the ancestor of cognition is reflex, and this at least is hard
>to do justice to if we interpret it as a computation.  A
>reflex is more like a bomb than like a computer, since it
>can be triggered and it has a certain timing and strength
>and direction and duration, and these are all critical to
>its functioning.

So what is it that is not being captured in a simulation of a bomb
exactly?  Why aren't bombs able to be interpreted as computation?

Certainly the mechanism you described, for calculating the triggering
of a bomb, can be seen as computational.  Are the effects of the bomb
computation?  If you incorporate the elements of the chunk of the
world effected by it into the symbol-structure of the computation,
then I think it certainly is computational.

Greg Stevens

stevens@prodigal.psych.rochester.edu



