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Published in:
Bringing Together Different Pieces to Better Understand Whole Minds Read chapter Read first chapter

2014 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

7. Virtual Machines: Nonreductionist Bridges Between the Functional and the Physical

Author : Matthias Scheutz

Published in: From Animals to Robots and Back: Reflections on Hard Problems in the Study of Cognition

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Various notions of supervenience have been proposed as a solution to the “mind–body problem” to account for the dependence of mental states on their realizing physical states. In this chapter, we view the mind–body problem as an instance of the more general problem of how a virtual machine (VM) can be implemented in other virtual or physical machines. We propose a formal framework for defining virtual machine architectures and how they are composed of interacting functional units. The aim is to define a rich notion of implementation that can ultimately show how virtual machines defined in different ontologies can be related by way of implementing one virtual machine in another virtual (or physical) machine without requiring that the ontology in which the implemented VM is defined to be reducible to the ontology of the implementing VM.

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previous chapter What Does It Mean to Have an Architecture?
next chapter Building for the Future: Architectures for the Next Generation of Intelligent Robots
Footnotes
1
There are various versions of these three notions depending on how the modalities are defined. Furthermore, there are other kinds of supervenience, which involve relationships between patterns, or mathematical structures, e.g., one mathematical structure modeled in another.
 
2
Note that the difference between strong and weak supervenience lies in the added necessity operator in the last conjunct.
 
3
Ideally, a functional specification should be able to reduce the overall functional architecture to atomic functional units and their connections.
 
4
Note that this does not imply that the unit does not have internal states of any internal structure, only that we do not know what the details of its inner states or internal structure.
 
5
This is the overall duration between any input and the propagated effect through the one connected line to any output.
 
6
Note that we can get an “incomplete” extension the same we got an incomplete composition by ignoring the input states of the second unit and the output states of the first that are not connected.
 
7
Cp. this with Copeland (1996) notion of architecture, which is based on the idea that one can label parts of a physical system, and with Gandy 1980, who uses hereditarily finite sets to form such hierarchies of parts of systems.
 
8
See Scheutz (1999) about the qualifier “syntactic isomorphism” (for all practical purposes we can simply consider it here an isomorphic mapping).
 
Literature
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Gandy R (1980) Church’s thesis and principles for mechanisms. Stud Log Found Math 101:123–148
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Scheutz M (1999) When physical systems realize functions. Mind Mach 9:161–196CrossRef
Scheutz M (2001) Causal versus computational complexity? Mind Mach 11:534–566CrossRef
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Metadata
Title
Virtual Machines: Nonreductionist Bridges Between the Functional and the Physical
Author
Matthias Scheutz
Copyright Year
2014
Book
From Animals to Robots and Back: Reflections on Hard Problems in the Study of Cognition

Print ISBN: 978-3-319-06613-4

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-06614-1

Copyright Year: 2014

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06614-1_7

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