Computationalism is Dead; Now What? - Response to Fetzer's "Minds Are Not Computers: (Most) Thought Processes Are Not Computational"

In this paper I place Jim Fetzer's esemplastic burial of the computational conception of mind within the context of both my own burial and the theory of mind I would put in place of this dead doctrine. My view in a nutshell: Computationalism will yield Total Turing Test-passing zombies (in the philosopher's sense of `zombie'), but replicating persons will be unreachable for two reasons. One, persons process information at a "super"-Turing level; two, people enjoy certain properties (e.g., intentionality) beyond the reach of any mere information-processing object. Accordingly, computationalism ought to be supplanted with the engineering of "sub-person" artifacts and the irreducibly philosophical investigation of personhood. I end with nascent appraisal of Fetzer's interesting semiotic/connectionist replacement for computationalism. I'm grateful to Michael Costa for inviting Jim Fetzer to organize a symposium on whether minds are computational systems for the annual meeting of the Sout..