Computers Can Do Almost Nothing -- Except Cognition (Perhaps) [SHAIL 2012]
Channel: Robohub
Date: 2013-03-09

In this lecture, Vincent C. Müller (Anatolia College, Greece) talks about computers and cognition.

The basic idea of classical cognitive science and classical AI is that if the brain is a computer then we could just reproduce brain function on different hardware. The assumption that this function (cognition) is computing has been much criticized; I propose to assume it is true and to see what would follow.

Let us take it as definitional that computing is 'multiply realizable': Strictly the same computing procedure can be realized on different hardware. (This is true if computing is understood as digital algorithmic procedures, in the sense of Church and Turing.) But in multiple realizations only the syntactic computational properties are retained from one realization to the other, while the physical and semantic properties may or may not be. So, even if the brain is indeed a computer, realizing it in different hardware might not have the desired effects because the hardware-dependent effects are not computational: Just computing can't even switch on a red light; a computer model of an apple tree will not produce apples. But perhaps cognition is different. Is cognition one the properties that are retained in different realizations?

The ShanghAI Lectures (http://shanghailectures.org/) are a video conference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence run by Rolf Pfeifer and organized by Nathan Labhart and partners around the world. Recordings of these lectures and guest presentations are now made available on Robohub (http://robohub.org).