In his PhD thesis (1938) Turing introduced what he described as 'a new kind of machine'. He called these 'O-machines'. The present paper employs Turing's concept against a number of currently fashionable positions in the philosophy of mind.

We describe an emerging field, that of nonclassical computability and nonclassical computing machinery. According to the nonclassicist, the set of well-defined computations is not exhausted by the computations that can be carried out by a Turing machine. We provide an overview of the field and a philosophical defence of its foundations.

We investigate systems of ordinary differential equations with a parameter. We show that under suitable assumptions on the systems the solutions are computable in the sense of recursive analysis. As an application we give a complete characterization of the recursively enumerable sets using Fourier coefficients of recursive analytic functions that are generated by differential equations and elementary operations.

A myth has arisen concerning Turing's paper of 1936, namely that Turing set forth a fundamental principle concerning the limits of what can be computed by machine - a myth that has passed into cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, to wide and pernicious effect. This supposed principle, sometimes incorrectly termed the 'Church-Turing thesis', is the claim that the class of functions that can be computed by machines is identical to the class of functions that can be computed by (...) Turing machines. In point of fact Turing himself nowhere endorses, nor even states, this claim (nor does Church). I describe a number of notional machines, both analogue and digital, that can compute more than a universal Turing machine. These machines are exemplars of the class of _nonclassical_ computing machines. Nothing known at present rules out the possibility that machines in this class will one day be built, nor that the brain itself is such a machine. These theoretical considerations undercut a number of foundational arguments that are commonly rehearsed in cognitive science, and gesture towards a new class of cognitive models. (shrink)

A survey of the field of hypercomputation, including discussion of a variety of objections.