Erik Hoel: conflating computational functionalism with behaviorism is misinformation
erikphoel · x · 2026-11-13
Erik Hoel pushes back in a consciousness-theory debate, calling the claim that computational function makes neural architecture irrelevant to consciousness "misinformation" — that view is behaviorism, which he argues is a terrible theory of consciousness. The accompanying excerpt distinguishes a behaviorist theory of consciousness from computational functionalism: the latter still requires reasoning about a system's internal workings, unlike a black-box behaviorism that would assign consciousness even to a lookup table.
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