What is Computationalism

Contemporary understandings of the mind are seemingly free from the need for a soul of the kind imagined by Descartes. While for Descartes the soul represented a part of the self that could not be accounted for in a materialist, mechanistic explanation, today the soul has been replaced by the mind, which in the era of the computer is widely understood to be produced by information processing. However, while computationalist models seek to provide a purely materialist explanation for the mind, this is compromised by their reliance on a historically specific belief in the immateriality of information. Computationalist accounts of the mind cast information as an immaterial, universal substance that performs the same function as the soul and leads back into many of the problems inherent in the Cartesian account. These problems are illustrated by some of the more extreme speculation regarding the future relationship between brain and computer.