Computer science has been notably successful in building devices capable of performing sophisticated intellectual tasks. Impressed by these successes, many philosophers of mind have embraced a computational account of the mind. Computationalism, as this view is called, is committed to the literal truth of the claim that the mind is a computer: Mental states, processes, and events are computational states, processes, and events.

The Basic Idea

What exactly are computational states, processes, and events? Most generally, a physical system, such as the human brain, implements a computation if the causal structure of the system—at a suitable level of description—mirrors the formal structure of the computation. This requires a one to one mapping of formal states of the computation to physical state-types of the system. The mapping from formal state-types to physical state types can be called an interpretation function I. I allows a sequence of physical...