Monday, August 25, 2003

In Communications of the ACM Sep. 2003, Keith Devlin writes The familiar sleek metal boxes don't, in and themselves, compute. As electrical devices, if they can be said to do anything, it's physics. It is only by virtue of the way we design their electrical circuits that, when the current flows, obeying the laws of physics, we human observers pretend they are performing reasoning (following the laws of logic), numerical calculations (following the laws of arithmetic), or searches for information. Except that computation on Earth goes back at least as far as the evolution of RNA, without human designers to imbue it with meaning. Ands, ors, and nots exist in cell regulatory networks independently of our observations and designs. They exist in our brains independently of our observations and designs too. The laws of logic and arithmetic are abstractions: abstractions of natural information processing that evolved in living systems much before we got around to discovering them as tools for conscious information processing. 9:05:17 PM