Bilkent ACM SIGART (Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence)

Seminar entitled

Abstract: Research programs in both cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence have been founded on a computational view of mind. So ubiquitous is the modern digital computer and so powerful its hold over our conception of the world, that many people now view the human mind quite literally as a computer. Implement the right program and you would actually have constructed a mind. This, often tacit assumption, has been strongly challenged from a philosophical perspective by Searle and others. Moreover, the resurgence of connectionism and the growth of other paradigms such as situated robotics and dynamic and chaotic systems, has cast doubt on the view that conventional computers are the only or even the most suitable basis for cognition. One consequence of all this, has been a realisation that computation itself is not well understood. Indeed, many other technical terms, such as symbols, syntax and cognition, now seem in need of clarification. In this informal talk, I will try to present a view of computation which I believe is clear enough to help us understand the necessary distinctions, without doing injustice to our popular conceptions.