models of neural computation

In contemporary philosophy, materialist theories of the mind have dominated discussion in the philosophy of mind, with versions of the Computational theory of the Mind (CTM) being in the mainstream. The CTM is based on the intuition that the mind is a computer, and mental processes involve computations. The idea of the mind as a computer program was originally proposed by Putnam (1960). It was based on the abstract idea of computation derived from the work of Turing (1936) and Church (1936) and others who formalised the notion of algorithm or effective procedure in mathematics. An algorithm is an explicit step by step procedure consisting of a set of instructions. When these instructions are carried out sequentially over input values it transforms them in a deterministic way into one or more subsequent states plus intermediate values and finally into output values. This makes it possible to define solutions to problems of a class which are effectively decidable i.e. can be mechanically done by rote by pencil and paper alone. Such a procedure or algorithm constitutes the machine table or program of a computer.