What Cannot Be Computed

The aspects of human intelligence that cannot be computed are not the marginal aspects. They are the central aspects — the ones that make intelligence worth having and that determine the moral significance of the creatures who have it. Midgley's entire philosophical project was organized around this claim, and her resistance to the computational theory of mind was grounded in her recognition that computation, however powerful, operates on symbols according to rules, while caring, wondering, and significance require a being for whom the symbols mean what they say. A life of pure computation — processing information without ever caring about it, solving problems without finding them interesting, producing outputs without being moved by them — would not be a life at all. It would be a function. And a function, however efficient, is not the kind of thing that has moral standing.