Physical Computation as Dynamics of Form that Glues Everything Together

Abstract

Abstract:The framework is proposed where matter can be seen as related to energy in a way structure relates to process and information relates to computation. In this scheme matter corresponds to a structure, which corresponds to information. Energy corresponds to the ability to carry out a process, which corresponds to computation. The relationship between each two complementary parts of each dichotomous pair (matter/energy, structure/process, information/computation) are analogous to the relationship between being and becoming, where being is the persistence of an existing structure while becoming is the emergence of a new structure through the process of interactions. This approach presents a unified view built on two fundamental ontological categories: Information and computation. Conceptualizing the physical world as an intricate tapestry of protoinformation networks evolving through processes of natural computation helps to make more coherent models of nature, connecting non-living and living worlds. It presents a suitable basis for incorporating current developments in understanding of biological/cognitive/social systems as generated by complexification of physicochemical processes through self-organization of molecules into dynamic adaptive complex systems by morphogenesis, adaptation and learning -all of which are understood as information processing.

Nature as a network of morphological infocomputational processes for cognitive agents

“…This idea gets further developed in his Constructor Theory of Information [50]. The same emphasis on the dual nature of information/computation is found in Dodig Crnkovic [51] as well as Zenil [52].…”

Computational Dynamics of Natural Information Morphology, Discretely Continuous

“…Physical theories are based on representations of systems, while the reality is, in practice, inexhaustible, and can never be captured in its entirety in a representation. Different classes of cognitive agents have different representations of reality based on their morphologies (structures), which constrain possible interactions (morphological computations) at different levels of organization, such as physical, chemical, and biological to cognitive computation [1,2,38].…”

Intelligence and Reference

“…However, as Dodig-Crnkovic emphasizes, such a complementarity might emerge only when a foundational theory of NC will be sufficiently developed, overall as to semantic and the logic of NC. The present contribution is devoted precisely to this aim, even though it is necessary to add to the previous list other two essential dichotomic characters of NC, emphasized by Dodig-Crnkovic in other papers, overall the more recent one published on the Information journal [7] …”

“…So Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) 7 And that holds in all the other things relating each other like the measure and the measured, … (Q. de Ver., 21, 1. Square parentheses and italics are mine).…”

“…So, Aquinas' idea is that the predicative statement, when applied denoting a singular object must be characterized by a "mutual redefinition" between the subject S and the predicate P "causally" driven by the referential object itself. A procedure formalized in Kripke's frame (4) and that A. L. Perrone first demonstrated being 7 Historically, he first introduced the notion and the term of "intention" (intentio) in the epistemological discussion, in the context of his naturalistic ontology. The approach was hence rediscovered in the XIX century by the philosopher Franz Brentano, in the context of a conceptualist ontology, and hence passed to the phenomenological school, trough Brentano's most famous disciple: Edmund Husserl.…”