Simon Bowes

Simon Bowes

Concrete computations and virtual machines: In defence of a computational functionalism

Digital computation may not be sufficient for consciousness, but this doesn’t warrant biological naturalism. Rejecting coarse-grained Turing-computational functionalism and adopting a broader computationalism with no built-in syntax/semantics distinction, undermines the motivation for biological naturalism. 

Substrate dependent processes of the kind found in living things may be necessary for the emergence of consciousness, but these are functional requirements, not intrinsic properties.