How Much of the Mind is a Computer?

Abstract

How much of the mind is a computer? Computational psychologists, who ‘see psychology as the study of the various computational processes whereby mental representations are constructed, organised and transformed’, ¹say that most if not all of it is. I think they are wrong. Most of the mind is not a computer: most mental processes are not computations.

This paper is a sequel to my reply¹² to Margaret Boden,¹³ stimulated by criticisms made at a symposium, and later by Philip Johnson-Laird and Jerry Fodor. It was developed through seminars at the Institute for Systems Studies in Moscow and at La Trobe University before being given to the Sydney Symposium on Cognitive Science in August 1985. Since then it has been further revised in the light of seminars at the Queen’s University Belfast, Trinity College Dublin, the Institute of Philosophy in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Cambridge University and St David’s University College Lampeter. I am much indebted to those who took part in all those seminars, to others at Adelaide University and the Australian National University with whom I discussed it, and to Eliott Sober, Huw Price, Peter Gibbins, Benedict Heal and Jeremy Butterfield, whose comments on this and related topics have influenced it (if not always in ways they would approve of).