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Digital Computer Systems

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Book cover How Can Physics Underlie the Mind?

Part of the book series: The Frontiers Collection ((FRONTCOLL))

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Abstract

This chapter considers issues of emergence and causation in the case of digital computers, as a warm-up example before giving a general viewpoint on these topics in the next chapter. It will be shown that top-down causation is central to their functioning.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a hardcore reductionist, it is illegitimate to regard these levels as real: they are epiphenomena arising from the underlying physics. This viewpoint provides no useful understanding of the causation in action.

  2. 2.

    The Hotbits random number generator uses this technique: see http://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/.

  3. 3.

    I am aware that some present day feedback control systems use principles of adaptive control. I believe they should be labeled as such, to distinguish them from the basic cybernetic processes identified by Wiener, in which the goal is fixed.

  4. 4.

    This is what Penrose identifies as bottom-up organisation [53, p. 18], but this is incorrect, because he fails to recognise the top-down nature of the decision process via higher level selection criteria.

  5. 5.

    I thank Vasco Brattke for these characterisations.

  6. 6.

    I am indebted to Vasco Brattke (private communication) for the following comments.

  7. 7.

    I only consider classical computers here, where quantum uncertainty in the underlying physics has no effect on microcomputer operations because they have been carefully designed so that this will be the case. Quantum computing raises many further possibilities I do not engage with in this text.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South Africa

    George Ellis

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Correspondence to George Ellis .

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Ellis, G. (2016). Digital Computer Systems. In: How Can Physics Underlie the Mind?. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-49809-5_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-49809-5_2

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