Is there any Real Substance to the Claims for a ‘New Computationalism’?

Abstract

Computationalism is a relatively vague term used to describe attempts to apply Turing's model of computation to phenomena outside its original purview: in modelling the human mind, in physics, mathematics, etc. Early versions of computationalism faced strong objections from many (and varied) quarters, from philosophers to practitioners of the aforementioned disciplines. Here we will not address the fundamental question of whether computational models are appropriate for describing some or all of the wide range of processes that they have been applied to, but will focus instead on whether 'renovated' versions of the new computationalism shed any new light on or resolve previous tensions between proponents and skeptics. We find this, however, not to be the case, because the new computationalism falls short by using limited versions of "traditional computation", or proposing computational models that easily fall within the scope of Turing's original model, or else proffering versions of hypercomputation with its many pitfalls.

Artificial Intelligence Inheriting the Historical Crisis in Psychology: An Epistemological and Methodological Investigation of Challenges and Alternatives

“…By searching the Google Scholar and Scopus search engines for the words crisis and artificial intelligence , one cannot find pieces of the literature dedicated explicitly to the root of the crisis. Furthermore, when the word crisis is used, what is meant by that term are its outcomes (symptoms) such as the absence of a unified object of study, different competing directions, and the reform of methodology in the context of actual and objective tasks (e.g., Fuernsinn and Meyer, 1970 ; Tienson, 1988 ; Swann, 1992 ; Stojanov, 2001 ; Lindblom and Ziemke, 2003 ; Chella and Manzotti, 2011 ; Kaur, 2012 ; Hála, 2014 ; He et al, 2017 ; Hernández-Espinosa et al, 2017 ; Hutson, 2018 ; Kotseruba et al, 2020 ). However, a draft by Smith (2019) noted the fact that AI is undergoing a crisis.…”

Paths to Unconventional Computing: Causality in Complexity

“…I was, however, able to find very few such models that could be serious contenders, among the many that looked exotic and thus highly unlikely or unrealizable, with some of their proponents ranging from the unconventional to the eccentric. Some propose trivial modifications of the classical model or go so far as to embrace mysticism-a strong belief that their model captures a property of the real world that no other model can [31]. All models beyond the Turing model involve not only infinite numbers but infinite non-computable numbers [17], that is, numbers whose digits one cannot calculate by mechanistic, Turingtype means.…”