PHIL 346 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Computable Function, Intentionality

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- Original intentional contents are the intentional contents that the representations of an
intentional system have for that system
- what makes a system intelligent is what it can do, what it has the capacity to do
- intelligence is future oriented, whereas intentionality has a past-oriented requirement
- At the most basic computational level, computers are symbol crunchers, and for this reason
the computer model of the mind is often described as the symbol-manipulation view of the
mind
- there is a correlation between the meanings of our internal representations and their forms, and
this explains how it is that aUf syntactic engine can drive our semantic engine
- the key to computation is an isomorphism
- Searle suggests, everything (or rather everything that is big or complex enough to have
enough states) is every computer, and the claim that the brain is a computer has no bite. The
problem with this reasoning is that the isomorphism that makes a syntactic engine drive a
semantic engine is more full-bodied than Searle acknowledges
- it has to have symbolic states that satisfy not only the actual computation, but also the
possible computations that the computer could have performed
- Searle is right that whether something is a computer and what computer it is is in part up to
us. But what the example just given shows is that it is not totally up to us
Could a Machine Think by Churchland
- Could a machine think? many reasons for saying yes one of the deepest reasons lay in two
important results in computational theory
- 1. Church’s thesis, which states that every effectively computable function is recursively
computable
- Effectively computable means that there is a “rote” procedure for determining, in finite time,
the output of the function for a given input
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Document Summary

Original intentional contents are the intentional contents that the representations of an intentional system have for that system. What makes a system intelligent is what it can do, what it has the capacity to do. Intelligence is future oriented, whereas intentionality has a past-oriented requirement. At the most basic computational level, computers are symbol crunchers, and for this reason the computer model of the mind is often described as the symbol-manipulation view of the mind. There is a correlation between the meanings of our internal representations and their forms, and this explains how it is that auf syntactic engine can drive our semantic engine. The key to computation is an isomorphism. Searle suggests, everything (or rather everything that is big or complex enough to have enough states) is every computer, and the claim that the brain is a computer has no bite.

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