Well, that's kindasorta where I was going by complaining about definiteness. [sigh] If we allow that computations can arrive at indefinite answers (which I think is possible with Marcus' comment about symbolic "computation"), then it's hopeless. Computation covers everything. But if we force ourselves to abide by Soare's definition and computation must be definite, then there's PLENTY of reasoning processes that are excluded.
Of course, it's turtles all the way down, though. A pathological scenario is produced when you bind a variable with a schema so that you've effectively replaced one set of variables with another. You can keep doing that as long as you want ... even circularly. And that leads us to the higher order concept Rosen talks about, claiming that computers (or whatever your word for it is) are categorically different from living systems ... i.e. living systems can assign meaning to variables where machines cannot. Whether something fits the intuitive concept of "computation" usually ends up being about binding (or grounding). If it's all merely syntactic manipulation of symbols, then it's computation. If it's something more, if it _means_ something, then it's no longer computation. On 07/06/2016 12:05 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
I didn't ask it because I wasn't smart enough to think of it. I guess what I was fishing for is some sort of exploration of the idea that not all procedures for arriving at answers are computations.
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