Yogi JaegerThe history of computationalism in 1 tweet: (1) there was a theory of the human activity of calculating by rote. (2) Someone realized this is a physical activity. (3) Someone then fallaciously thought all physical activity [in the brain/universe] must be like calculating by rote.
This may be a bit of a hot take, I admit, but there really is nothing more to it than just that...
Roberto Toro@yoginho you wouldn't trace the roots of computationalism to logic?
@r3rt0 Nope. The idea that the universe is computable arguably originated with Newton, but computation in the modern sense definitely starts with Church/Turing. Uncountably many logically consistent systems are not Turing-computable.
@yoginho I see. But is Newtonian mechanics an example of computable theory? You can have, for example, a 3 body problem, which is fully Newtonian but not computable.
@r3rt0 Newton and his contemporaries use the verb "to compute" when talking about calculating predictions based on theory. But classical mechanics (in general) is not Turing-computable because of its continuum assumption and the non-computable reals that pop up as parameters in classical models (esp. deterministic chaos, i.e. the three-body problem).
@yoginho 👍 thank you!
@r3rt0 Book chapter on exactly this topic forthcoming very very soon!