“You can represent anything by state transitions.”
→ physics (and every representational theory we know) is computationalist.
Link to originalBackground for computational functionalism
Mathematics … the domain of all formal languages
Reality is math hypothesis … the universe is a mathematical object
Epistemological math hypothesis … all that can be known is mathematical (needs to be represented in a language)
Minds do math hypothesis … all mental activity can be described in mathematical terms
Classical mathematicians: “There exist mathematical objects that cannot be constructed (computed), but they nevertheless exist”
Computationalists: “That doesn’t make sense / you’re hallucinating those objects → Only constructive maths (computation) works” … At some point you run into contradictions. What you have to do instead is build up everything from a simple table of automata. There are many equivalent ways of doing this (church-turing thesis).
Some philosophers: “People can make proofs that computers cannot make”
Computational functionalist → Computers can think.
Foundations of computational functionalism
Information … discernible differences
Meaning … relationship to changes in other information
Functions … invariance in changes (mapping pattern → pattern, modelling transitions)
Objects … are constructed over invariances in relationships (functionalism)
Knowledge … representation of a model in a language, accurately describing predictive/observational patterns (abstract reasoning only or empirical)
Computationalist functionalism is not a theory that computers think… that’s an organic result of this much broader theory.