Not All Computational Methods Are Effective Methods

An effective method is a computational that might, in principle, be executed by human. In this paper, I argue there are methods for computing not methods. The examples consider taken primarily from quantum computing, but these only meant to illustrative of much wider class. Quantum inference and parallelism involve steps might implemented multiple physical systems, cannot implemented, or at least will, an idealised Recognising all important two reasons. First, it needed correctly state the results Turing other founders computation theory. sometimes said have offered replacement informal notion with formal machine. such view holds under limited circumstances. Second, distinguishing between can lead mistakes when quantifying over class possible Such quantification common philosophy mind context thought experiments explore limits functionalism. ‘homuncular’ should treated as valid.