creativesoul wrote: ↑Tue Nov 13, 2018 1:54 am
Computation is something that is done with language, and as such it is existentially dependent upon language. Thought is not. Therefore, thought is not equivalent to computation.
It seems to me that you are unaware of the history of computing then. 100 years ago "Computer" was a job title. It is something that HUMANS did.
Alan Turing merely formalised it by observing said Computers at work.
And so your conception of "computation" seems to be constrained to the digital form of modern computers, yet you fail to recognise that the first computers were Human wetware (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetware_computer ). Computation is something that was originally done with thought, not language - it was only formalised in the language of Mathematics .
Since then - quantum physicists have reconised the computational nature of reality. And since we are all made of quantum particles - i guess we are all (at least theoretically) computations. In a mathematical sense of the word (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus ). How broad do you want to go ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computation
A computation can be seen as a purely physical phenomenon occurring inside a closed physical system called a computer. Examples of such physical systems include digital computers, mechanical computers, quantum computers, DNA computers, molecular computers, microfluidics-based computers, analog computers, or wetware computers. This point of view has been adopted by the physics of computation, a branch of theoretical physics, as well as the field of natural computing.
An even more radical point of view, pancomputationalism, is the postulate of digital physics that argues that the evolution of the universe is itself a computation.
Since all forms of human enquiry can be reduced down to a decision problem - a yes/no questions you land up squarely in the domain of complexity theory:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALL_(complexity) and the first subclass RE (recursion):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RE_(complexity).
Which is basically the domain of - EVERYTHING! Recursion is computation and recursion is EVERYWHERE.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursion