CONCEPT
Computational Theory of Mind
The dominant framework in cognitive science since the 1950s: the mind is a computer, thinking is computation, and consciousness is the execution of the right program — the position Noë argues is profoundly wrong in its foundations.
The computational theory of mind (CTM) holds that mental states are computational states and that thinking is a species of information processing analogous to what digital computers do. First articulated by Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, and others in the 1960s and 1970s, CTM became the dominant framework in cognitive science and philosophy of mind, underwriting the research program of classical AI and, in revised form, the neural-network approach that produced large language models. Noë's enactivism constitutes one of the most rigorous philosophical challenges to CTM, arguing that consciousness is not computation but an embodied activity that no amount of processing can replicate in a disembodied system.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The computational theory of mind emerged in the wake of Alan Turing's work on computability and the Church-Turing thesis, which established that any effectively calculable function could be computed by a Turing machine. If mental processes