@Fil Albuquerque,
Regarding your "heart and soul" conviction... if you were working in the field (as I used to) I would be looking at your evidence. Since that appears not to be the case, I must assume that your "belief system", like many others, is based on faith rather than experience. Nowhere do I see you counter the point that all computation involves representation, and representation necessarily implies an observer independent ontology. Thus your
faith is one of "computational realism" which
my field experience indicates is at best arbitrary.
For example, so called "computational pattern recognition" involves a vast amount of computer power to apply "best guess" correlation procedures, yet comes nowhere close to the
contextual methods actually employed by human operators. Indeed, the very concept of a child learning language by "repetition" begs the question of how a child produces
socially acceptable sounds which are physically very different from the stimulus it was presented with. (On this point hinges Chomsky's demolition of behaviourist views of language acquisition which relied on "repetition")
