Computationalism ‒ Szymon Kaliski

Computationalism

computational theory of mind
mind is an information processing system
- cognition and consciousness are forms of computation
- the system "runs on" neural activity in the brain
various thoughts from Josha Bach:
- Turing test is a test if people they are generally intelligent enough to understand themselves to pass the Turing test
- children learn that they might do something they do not want to do - to do it they have to model themselves in the world (so they have to run artificial simulations)
- general intelligence is being able to create generalizations (models) from patterns - some of them are so complex that the thing needs to be able to model itself in the environment (emergent self awareness)
- mind is creating both the universe and the (story of) self - based on the inputs it's receiving (from retina for example) - you are the machine that thinks it's you
  - it simulates everything that it knows how to, including simulating a person
  - identity is a story that brain tells itself, there's no real me, each person has different simulation of me and I have one (or more) as well - self is an illusion made through Sequences of Static Snapshots
  - we suffer in our minds, and we can change our definition of suffering as well
    - related to: Stoicism, Epicureanism, CBT

tensions with computationalism
- connectionism models at "low-level" (neurons), where computationalism models at "symbolic level"
- connectionism focused on learning from stimuli (back-propagation in neural networks), where computationalism focuses on learning as "elaborating possibilities through symbolic processing"

also, brain writing the story (theory) of itself reminds me of Computationalism - to model complex situations it has to model itself inside of them

this might be loosely related to Metacognition and Debugging where we can also simulate our own thinking process to debug it (and even further simulating a brain inside a brain is one of ideas of Computationalism)