Abstract I shall begin by recalling what I perceive to be the four polarities of viewpoint that I enunciated in Shadows of the Mind (Penrose 1994: 12) with regard to the relationship between conscious thought and computation: All thinking is computation; in particular, feelings of conscious aware ness are evoked merely by the carrying out of appropriate computations. Awareness is a feature of...
Abstract In 1994 John Searle stated (Searle 1994: 11-12) that the Chinese Room Argument (CRA) is an attempt to prove the truth of the premise: led him to the conclusion that ‘programs are not minds’ and hence that computationalism, the idea that the essence of thinking lies in computational processes and that such processes thereby underlie and explain conscious thinking, is false. The argument...