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Computer Models of the Mind Are Invalid

In: Computers and Technology

Submitted By alfale
Words 9030
Pages 37
Journal of Information Technology (2008) 23, 55–62

& 2008 JIT Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. All rights reserved 0268-3962/08 $30.00 palgrave-journals.com/jit Debate and Perspectives

‘Computer models of the mind are invalid’
Ray Tallis1, Igor Aleksander2
1

5 Valley Road, Bramhall, Stockport, Cheshire, UK;
Imperial College of Science, Tech. and Medicine, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, London, UK

2

Correspondence:
R Tallis, 5 Valley Road, Bramhall, Stockport, Cheshire SK7 2NH, UK.
Tel: þ 44 7801 834230;
E-Mail: raymond@rtallis.wanadoo.co.uk

Journal of Information Technology (2008) 23, 55–62. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jit.2000128

Proposer: Professor Ray Tallis t is a great pleasure to have this joust with Igor who is not only a brilliant thinker about the mind, but also a great intellectual sparring partner. Igor has expressed his dissent from the view that I’m going to advance in support of the motion which is that ‘computer models of the mind are invalid’,1 in his book: The World in My Mind, My Mind
In The World: Key Mechanisms of Consciousness in Humans,
Animals and Machines. He actually devotes five pages of the final chapter to what he calls ‘Tallis’s complaint’ which I am now going to make public. The point of issue is whether computer models of the mind are valid. I am going to argue that they are not because the computational theory of mind is invalid. Igor may go on to argue that even if the computational theory of mind is invalid it may still be useful in the sense of being fruitful. I will leave him to prove that and simply suggest to you that while barking up the wrong tree may give a sense of progress it is illusory.
So what is the computational theory of mind? It is that the mind is to the brain as the software is to the hardware, or to put it slightly differently the mind is a set of computer programs implemented in the wetware of the

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