Our computational nature: comment on Barrett et al.

Frontiers in Psychology

John Klasios¹ 

关键词: evolutionary psychology;    computationalism;    human nature;    computers;    cognitive science;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01348

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

I argue that Barrett et al. (2014) have misinterpreted evolutionary psychologists' notion of computation. Barrett et al. seemingly presume that the notion of computation deployed by evolutionary psychologists (e.g., Pinker, 1997; Tooby and Cosmides, 2005) is tantamount to positing a physical architecture whose form of computation proceeds via the syntactic-like transformations of spatially discrete representational symbols or sentence-like structures—i.e., in the manner of a Turing machine. But this is simply not the notion of computation that evolutionary psychologists advocate (in spite of the fact that a Turing machine architecture, for instance, is nonetheless compatible with it).

【 授权许可】

CC BY