Biological hypercomputation: A new research problem in complexity theory

Abstract

This article discusses the meaning and scope of biological hypercomputation (BH) that is to be considered as new research problem within the sciences of complexity. The framework here is computational, setting out that life is not a standard Turing Machine. Living systems, we claim, hypercompute, and we aim at understanding life not by what it is, but rather by what it does. The distinction is made between classical and nonclassical hypercomputation. We argue that living processes are nonclassical hypercomputation. BH implies then new computational models. Finally, we sketch out the possibilities, stances, and reach of BH.

Complex Reaction Kinetics in Chemistry: A Unified Picture Suggested by Mechanics in Physics

“…These include applications to pharmacology, environmental pollution monitoring, and food industry. In particular, biological systems are often characterized by complex chemical pathways whose modeling is rather challenging and can not be recast in standard schemes [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] (see also [16][17][18][19] for a different perspective). In general, one tries to split such sophisticated systems into a set of elementary constituents, in mutual interaction, and for which a clear formalization is available [20][21][22][23][24][25].…”

“…Regarding the former, the complex picture of yeast's enzymes evidenced by Koshland [32,53], where positive and negative cooperativity appear simultaneously (and with the anticooperativity effect getting more and more pronounced as the substrate concentration is raised), still escapes from this mathematical architecture. Further, from the mechanical point of view, two weird things happen: the velocity is bounded by = 1, while in Classical Mechanics the velocity may diverge; further, if we look at the Boltzmann factor in the free energy (see (12)), this reads as exp[ (− 2 /2 + )] and, recalling that the kinetic energy in this mechanical analogy reads as 2 /2 (the mass is unitary, thus velocity and momentum coincide), we are allowed to interpret ( , , ℎ) as a real action. From this perspective, the exponent can be thought of as the coupling between the stress-energy tensor and the metric tensor: a glance at the form of the Boltzmann factor reveals that the natural underlying metric is (−1, +1) rather than (+1, +1) as in classical Euclidean frames, or in other words, it is of the Minkowskian type.…”

Is there any Real Substance to the Claims for a ‘New Computationalism’?

“…More recently, Maldonado [21,22] has offered a defense of a form of biological hypercomputation, claiming that: "[...] life is not a standard Turing Machine, but rather that living systems hypercompute, and that an understanding of life is reached not by grasping what life is but what it does.…”

“…Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of the arguments of a group of researchers looking for new notions or types of computation is that while openly accepting that (natural) computing is about information processing (as is classical computation) [6], and also that nature certainly computes (because computers exist in and within nature), they posit a different kind of computation than the classical one [22] while using nature as evidence for non-Turing computation. At the same time none of them specifies exactly what makes this kind of computation distinctive, beyond stressing its difference from a Turing machine (or a trivial modification of a Turing machine, e.g., a nonterminating one, such as a cellular automaton, which can hardly be classified as non-classical).…”

A Step toward Understanding Information Processing in Plants. Explaining the Complexity of Life Thanks to Plants Physiology

“…The kind of processing of information by living beings has been named biological hyper computation [3]. This short essay aims at explaining how the processing of information occurs among the plants.…”