Slide 20 of 21
Notes:
One problem that some investigators have with the functional definition of mind is its implication that mere computation is sufficient to constitute a mind. On this definition, not only do animals have a mind, but computers must also be said to have a mind, and perhaps even microwave ovens and wrist watches. According to some investigators, such as Stevan Harnad, something more is needed besides computation to constitute a mind. The missing ingredient is some way to escape from pure syntax—syntactic processing is mindless, minds inextricably require semantics.
Syntactic processing is just the use of rules that transform one set of symbols into another set of symbols. For example, the string of symbols "2 + 2" is transformed to the symbol "4" by the addition rule. A computer can be programmed to perform this transformation without knowing anything about arithmetic or about what the symbols stand for. The rules that determine these transformations depend only the "shapes" of the symbols and not on what the symbols represent.
We may not be able to know what it is like to be a bat, but we can know something about the cognitive processes that mediate between its sensory system and its behavior.
