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Concrete Digital Computation: What Does It Take For A Physical System To Compute?, Nir Fresco

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

This paper deals with the question: what are the key requirements for a physical system to perform digital computation? Time and again cognitive scientists are quick to employ the notion of computation simpliciter when asserting basically that cognitive activities are computational. They employ this notion as if there was or is a consensus on just what it takes for a physical system to perform computation, and in particular digital computation. Some cognitive scientists in referring to digital computation simply adhere to Turing's notion of computability. Classical computability theory studies what functions on the natural numbers are computable and what mathematical …