title: The computationalist reformulation of the mind-body problem.
abstract: Computationalism, or digital mechanism, or simply mechanism, is a hypothesis in the cognitive science according to which we can be emulated by a computer without changing our private subjective feeling. We provide a weaker form of that hypothesis, weaker than the one commonly referred to in the (vast) literature and show how to recast the mind-body problem in that setting. We show that such a mechanist hypothesis does not solve the mind-body problem per se, but does help to reduce partially the mind-body problem into another problem which admits a formulation in pure arithmetic. We will explain that once we adopt the computationalist hypothesis, which is a form of mechanist assumption, we have to derive from it how our belief in the physical laws can emerge from *only* arithmetic and classical computer science. In that sense we reduce the mind-body problem to a body problem appearance in computer science, or in arithmetic. The general shape of the possible solution of that subproblem, if it exists, is shown to be closer to "Platonist or neoplatonist theology" than to the "Aristotelian theology". In Plato's theology, the physical or observable reality is only the shadow of a vaster hidden nonphysical and nonobservable, perhaps mathematical, reality. The main point is that the derivation is constructive, and it provides the technical means to derive physics from arithmetic, and this will make the computationalist hypothesis empirically testable, and thus scientific in the Popperian analysis of science. In case computationalism is wrong, the derivation leads to a procedure for measuring "our local degree of noncomputationalism".
authors.affiliation: IRIDIA, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. Electronic address: marchal@ulb.ac.be.
authors.forename: Bruno
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Marchal
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001703:Biophysics / Q000379:methods*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D008433:Mathematics; D008954:Models, Biological; D008967:Molecular Biology / Q000379:methods; D011603:Psychophysiology / Q000379:methods*; D049490:Systems Biology / Q000379:methods*; D018511:Systems Integration
keywords: Church-turing thesis; Computationalism; Filmed graph argument; Quantum logic; Self-reference; Universal dovetailer argument