Gualtiero Piccinini, “Physical Computation: A Mechanistic Account” (Oxford UP, 2016)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Jul 15, 2017 · 1h 2m

A popular way of thinking about the mind and its relation to physical stuff is in terms of computation. This general information-processing approach to solving the mind-body problem admits of a number of different, often incompatible, elaborations. In Physical Computation: A Mechanistic Account (Oxford University Press, 2016), Gualtiero Piccinini integrates research in mechanistic and psychological explanation, computability theory, and other areas to provide a detailed account of the sense in which some, but not all, physical systems compute, and in which genuine computing systems need not…