Duncecap Posted:

Ahhh, I see where you’re going now.

Yeah, that’s absolutely right.

No, I’ve never heard of this fellow Hofstadter. He wrote something worthwhile, I take it?

Sarcasm? Well, in case it is not, he wrote a number of books including Godel, Escher, Bach, which has become famous among those (both within and outside the field) interested in philosophy of mind and computation. I haven’t looked at it in ages. Couldn’t give a fair appraisal.

I’m a mathematical programmer by trade, that’s where this is all coming from ;p

As in optimization? Or as in, slave to Stephen Wolfram? Log in to see images!

The question this all sprang from was the legitimacy of thought: If thought is not necessarily legitimate, then we are not a necessary condition for thought.

But nevertheless, if thought exists, thought exists.

There also exists the possibility that thought also does not exist, but that is entirely outside, and a few provinces away from, the modality of this argument.

Clearly thought exists in some sense.

I guess what I was trying to say is that thought may be regarded as a form of computation, but that doesn’t mean all computation is thought.

You were right to not privilege it over other forms of computation, though.