In the first, he uses John Searle's Chinese Room argument to demonstrate that a computer cannot be conscious. If you've been paying attention to this blog, you should know what I think of that argument!
In the second post, he uses an article by Jack Copeland which undermines the position of philosophers who take the Church-Turing thesis to imply that a Turing machine can do any computation performable by any machine. Unfortunately, Pigliucci seems to fail to realise that while Copeland is technically correct, the philosophers he criticises are no less so unless some very unlikely propositions turn out to be true (i.e. that the laws of physics are not computable and the brain is a hypercomputer).
But what motivated me to write this post is the same tired old argument that keeps coming up again and again in these discussions, the analogy to photosynthesis.
