ABSTRACT
Modern computationalism unites two distinct ideas: the first that reasoning, more generally mental activity, may be decomposed into simple, formal steps; the second that these simple steps may be functionally realized by a physical system. These two ideas follow separate trajectories in the pre-history of the computational mind. Descartes, for instance, developed a detailed account of how paradigmatic psychological processes, such as perception, memory, and emotion, might be realized in a mechanical system, yet he maintained that thought per se occupied a separate ontological realm. Leibniz also held that thought could not be reduced to material interactions, yet he endorsed the idea that thought could be decomposed into a sequence of simple formal steps. Overlapping Descartes and Leibniz, both temporally and ideologically, Hobbes combined a mechanistic theory of psychological processes and a computational theory of thought to articulate a precursor to reductive computationalism.
