Comfunctianism

Every philosophy needs a sage. This one gets Daniel Dennett, posthumously promoted to Comfunctius and rendered as a Byzantine icon holding a tablet — Sacred Sage of Computational Functionalist Philosophy.

The slide's own caption does the work: “ComFunctionism is not a religion. That sets it apart.”

The actual position, minus the halo:

Computationalist functionalism. Squash it and you get Comfunctionalism; squash it differently and you get a Confucius pun. He uses both spellings on purpose — the -ianism when he's doing the bit, the -ionalism when he's arguing.

And the meaning of a discernible difference is its relationship to other changes. That is the whole ontology. Information is fundamental — not any particular mind's opinion about it.

Which is precisely what he wants to contrast against the rival church. But first he has to say where we actually are.

Note item four. AI was not on the critical path. He runs Gary Marcus's dated predictions against the record and observes they were beaten by multiple years, then turns it on the coverage rather than the man: journalists describe a consensus reality they create, not the world that unfolds.

Here is the objection he needs to kill. Simulated water cannot make you wet. Christof Koch's upgrade of it is stronger: a simulation has no causal power to condense atmospheric water or curve spacetime. Simulated black holes warp nothing.

His answer is to re-describe the machine. The Turing machine was never meant to be the best account of a computer — it existed to rescue part of classical mathematics via one particular argument. What a computer is is an insulator: it filters away the physics of the universe it sits in, so a universe with its own rules can run inside.

Nothing in Minecraft is touched by the physics of the machine Minecraft runs on. That insulation is exactly what a mind needs to hold imagined worlds, memories, futures, alternate realities — “in short, if you want to think and dream.”

This is the inversion the whole talk is built to deliver, and he does not soften it. Consciousness contains things physics does not accommodate — colours, sounds, emotions, expressions of attention. Those require the laws of an alternate universe in which supernatural things are possible.

A computer is what provides one. So Koch has it exactly backwards: it isn't that simulations are too weak for consciousness.

Consciousness cannot happen in physics. It can only happen in a simulation.

He delivers the line about the supernatural to a room of computer scientists at nine minutes past the hour, and moves on before anyone can object.

Computer science already supplies a theory of representation, a practical model of epistemology, testable paradigms, and empirical wins against total cultural opposition. It never translated any of it into the other disciplines, never reflected on its own philosophy, and over-weighted “artificiality” and “intelligence” as the framing.

So: give it a name, a sage, and a value proposition. Delivered deadpan, in the cadence of a meditation app.

“I learned this from the Buddhists.”

Classical mathematics defines its worlds with black-box axioms. Computation requires filling the boxes. Most scientific thinking is still classical, and that is the divide he actually cares about — social epistemology is incoherent, axiomatic epistemology does not converge for AI models, and only constructive epistemology allows derivation.

Gödel gets defused rather than revered — read as a property of systems that never stop mumbling, not a barrier to machine minds.

The Lebowski theorem, illustrated by the Dude on his couch, sitting inside a list of genuinely hard problems: stake, persistence, substrate independence, copying, modifiability.