Abstract
The main contribution of this paper is a naturalized account of the phenomenon of computation. The key idea for the development of this account is the identification of the notion of syntactical processing (or information processing) with the dynamical evolution of a constrained physical process, based on the observation that both evolve according to an arbitrary set of rules. This identification, in turn, revealed that, from the physical point of view, computation could be understood in terms of the operation of a component subdivided into two parts, (a) the constrained process and (b) the constraints that control its dynamics, where the interactions with the rest of the system are mediated by configurational changes of the constrained process. The immediate consequence of this analysis is the observation that this notion of computation can be readily integrated into the enactive paradigm of cognition.
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Notes
- 1.
See Rosen (1986) for a more precise characterization of the modes of description offered by Newtonian particle mechanics and analytic mechanics, where the concept of constraint was first introduced.
- 2.
It should also be mentioned that, in the more interesting cases, the operation of the constraint, i.e., the particular way in which the constraint affects the lower level elements, may depend on the state of those elements at a given moment.
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Brito, C.F., Marques, V.X. (2016). Is There a Role for Computation in the Enactive Paradigm?. In: Müller, V.C. (eds) Fundamental Issues of Artificial Intelligence. Synthese Library, vol 376. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26485-1_6
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