Abstract
Mental representations, Swiatczak (Minds Mach 21:19–32, 2011) argues, are fundamentally biochemical and their operations depend on consciousness; hence the computational theory of mind, based as it is on multiple realisability and purely syntactic operations, must be wrong. Swiatczak, however, is mistaken. Computation, properly understood, can afford descriptions/explanations of any physical process, and since Swiatczak accepts that consciousness has a physical basis, his argument against computationalism must fail. Of course, we may not have much idea how consciousness (itself a rather unclear plurality of notions) might be implemented, but we do have a hypothesis—that all of our mental life, including consciousness, is the result of computational processes and so not tied to a biochemical substrate. Like it or not, the computational theory of mind remains the only game in town.
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Notes
Notice, that, in effect, creature consciousness is affecting mental-state consciousness.
Such distinctions correspond roughly to the transitive (aware-of) and intransitive (awake) versions of creature consciousness.
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Davenport, D. Computationalism: Still the Only Game in Town. Minds & Machines 22, 183–190 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-012-9271-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-012-9271-5