Approximately 48 hours ago, knowing that I would, Lord willing, be stand- ing here on this podium two days hence, I tapped http://www.fsf.org into Safari in order to begin learning at least something about the Free Software Movement (FSM). My online education has been augmented by many propo- nents of FSM in attendance at this conference, including Richard Stallman. What I have learned is that this movement is populated by a lot of seem- ingly well-intentioned people who are, at least (...) for the time being, utterly irrational, or worse. In wanting to point out why logic has heretofore been lost on the folks in question, I find within my command an embarrassment of riches. The five minutes at my disposal here is slim indeed, but nonetheless sufficient to reveal the untenability of FSM to those not gripped by an ide- ology: I shall mention here just a needle of fatal truth from the vast supply before me. (shrink)

The increased interactivity and connectivity of computational devices along with the spreading of computational tools and computational thinking across the fields, has changed our understanding of the nature of computing. In the course of this development computing models have been extended from the initial abstract symbol manipulating mechanisms of stand-alone, discrete sequential machines, to the models of natural computing in the physical world, generally concurrent asynchronous processes capable of modelling living systems, their informational structures and dynamics on both symbolic and (...) sub-symbolic information processing levels. Present account of models of computation highlights several topics of importance for the development of new understanding of computing and its role: natural computation and the relationship between the model and physical implementation, interactivity as fundamental for computational modelling of concurrent information processing systems such as living organisms and their networks, and the new developments in logic needed to support this generalized framework. Computing understood as information processing is closely related to natural sciences; it helps us recognize connections between sciences, and provides a unified approach for modeling and simulating of both living and non-living systems. (shrink)

The dominant scientific and philosophical view of the mind – according to which, put starkly, cognition is computation – is refuted herein, via specification and defense of the following new argument: Computation is reversible; cognition isn't; ergo, cognition isn't computation. After presenting a sustained dialectic arising from this defense, we conclude with a brief preview of the view we would put in place of the cognition-is-computation doctrine.

When Ken Malone investigates a case of something causing mental static across the United States, he is teleported to a world that doesn't exist.