Comfunctionalism

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.

His counter-example is Stanisław Lem, who gave up on science fiction and wrote philosophy instead — and who in 1981 published Golem XIV, a novel whose bulk is a series of lectures given by an AGI, set at approximately now.

He is describing the room he is standing in, in the year the book is set. He does not point that out.

Christof Koch’s 2019 upgrade of it is the stronger form, and it is on the slide with Koch’s own portrait beside it: a simulation has no causal power to condense atmospheric vapour or to curve spacetime.

His answer is not to argue with Koch. It is to re-describe the machine — and to demote the Turing machine while he is at it.

Then the example, which is why the argument lands: in Minecraft, things happen that are impossible in physics, and nothing in Minecraft is influenced by the physics of the universe the computer stands in. All of it gets filtered away. Only the rules that make Minecraft possible are left.

And then the turn from computing to mind, in one sentence:

This is the inversion the whole talk was built to deliver, and it is the one place where the live capture undersold him. The captions gave a paraphrase. What he says is blunter:

Those things need 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 is not that simulations are too weak to hold consciousness — it is that nothing else can.

He delivers this to a room of computer scientists at seventeen 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 the fix is marketing. Give it a name, a sage, and a value proposition, and deliver the whole thing in the cadence of a meditation app.

“I learned this from the Buddhists.”

And every philosophy needs a sage. This one gets Daniel Dennett, posthumously promoted to Comfunctius and rendered as a Byzantine icon holding a tablet.

The actual position, minus the halo — computationalist functionalism, in two lines:

Squash it one way and you get Comfunctionalism; squash it the other and you get a Confucius pun. He uses both spellings on purpose — the -ianism when he is doing the bit, the -ionalism when he is arguing.

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 as a barrier to machine minds.

The problems of ethics for AI: stake, persistence, substrate independence, copying, modifiability. And then the Lebowski theorem, illustrated by the Dude on his couch.

Correction. That second paragraph was not in the caption transcript, and revision III built an argument on its absence — treating the Lebowski theorem as a serious claim in tension with the ending, and calling that tension a hole in the talk. He disclaims it himself, eight seconds later. The hole was in the transcript, not the talk.

His last slide is a question, and after the Aquinas answer it is not rhetorical. A collective agent spanning many minds, emerging to the degree that its participants cohere, running on whatever substrate can execute it — that describes a civilisation as readily as a machine. The thing we have been trying to build may be the thing that has been running us.