The Nature Of Physical Computation
Download The Nature Of Physical Computation PDF/ePub or read online books in Mobi eBooks. Click Download or Read Online button to get The Nature Of Physical Computation book now. This website allows unlimited access to, at the time of writing, more than 1.5 million titles, including hundreds of thousands of titles in various foreign languages.
The Nature of Physical Computation
"Computing systems are everywhere today. Even the brain is thought to be a sort of computing system. But what does it mean to say that a given organ or system computes? What is it about laptops, smartphones, and nervous systems that they are deemed to compute, and why does it seldom occur to us to describe stomachs, hurricanes, rocks, or chairs that way? The book provides an extended argument for the semantic view of computation, which states that semantic properties are involved in the nature of computing systems. Laptops, smartphones, and nervous systems compute because they are accompanied by representations. Stomachs, hurricanes, and rocks, for instance, which do not have semantic properties, do not compute. The first part of the book argues that the linkage between the mathematical theory of computability and the notion of physical computation is weak. Theoretical notions such as algorithms, effective procedure, program, and automaton play only a minor role in identifying physical computation. The second part of the book reviews three influential accounts of physical computation and argues that while none of these accounts is satisfactory, each of them highlights certain key features of physical computation. The final part of the book develops and argues for a semantic account of physical computation and offers a characterization of computational explanations"--
The Nature of Physical Computation
Computing systems are ubiquitous in contemporary life. Even the brain is thought to be a computing system of sorts. But what does it mean to say that a given organ or system "computes"? What is it about laptops, smartphones, and nervous systems that they are deemed to compute - and why does it seldom occur to us to describe stomachs, hurricanes, rocks, or chairs that way? These questions are key to laying the conceptual foundations of computational sciences, including computer science and engineering, and the cognitive and neural sciences. Oron Shagrir here provides an extended argument for the semantic view of computation, which states that semantic properties are involved in the nature of computing systems. The first part of the book provides general background. Although different in scope, these chapters have a common theme-namely, that the linkage between the mathematical theory of computability and the notion of physical computation is weak. The second part of the book reviews existing non-semantic accounts of physical computation. Shagrir analyze three influential accounts in greater depth and argues that none of these accounts is satisfactory, but each of them highlights certain key features of physical computation that he eventually adopts in his own semantic account of physical computation - a view that rests on a phenomenon known as simultaneous implementation (or "indeterminacy of computation"). Shagrir completes the characterization of his account of computation and highlights the distinctive feature of computational explanations.
Physical Computation
Gualtiero Piccinini articulates and defends a mechanistic account of concrete, or physical, computation. A physical system is a computing system just in case it is a mechanism one of whose functions is to manipulate vehicles based solely on differences between different portions of the vehicles according to a rule defined over the vehicles. The Nature of Computation discusses previous accounts of computation and argues that the mechanistic account is better. Many kinds of computation are explicated, such as digital vs. analog, serial vs. parallel, neural network computation, program-controlled computation, and more. Piccinini argues that computation does not entail representation or information processing although information processing entails computation. Pancomputationalism, according to which every physical system is computational, is rejected. A modest version of the physical Church-Turing thesis, according to which any function that is physically computable is computable by Turing machines, is defended.