Computationalism: Still the only game in town-A reply to Swiatczak's "Conscious representations: An intractable problem for the computational theory of mind"

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. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011.