If a Tree Casts a Shadow, is

it Telling the Time?

Russ Abbott
California State University, Los Angeles
 One day, Mara, the Buddhist god of ignorance
and evil, was traveling through the villages of
India with his attendants.
He saw a man doing walking meditation. The
man’s face was lit up in wonder.
He had just discovered something on the ground
in front of him.
Mara's attendants asked what the man had
discovered.

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Humans: smart enough to have ideas;
foolish enough to believe them.

“A piece of truth,” Mara replied.

“Doesn't this bother you when someone finds a
piece of the truth, O evil one?” his attendants asked.
“No,” Mara replied. “Right after this they usually
make a belief out of it.”
-- Christina Feldman and Jack Kornfield, in “Stories of the Spirit,
Stories of the Heart,” from Everyday Mind, Jean Smith (ed) .

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 Preview of issues and answers
 What is computation?
 Physical processes are computation when we treat them as
externalized thought.
 What is the relationship between ideas and programs?

Programs are how we understand rigorous thought to be expressed.
 When can a natural process be used for computation?

Computation involves the playing out of fixed natural processes
against a contingent environment.
 How do we think about the relationship between ourselves
as rational beings and the environment?

The agent-based model of computation is the right way to think
about our interaction with an environment.
• But we do not yet understand multi-scalar environments.

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Is Google reading my email?
 Answer from the Gmail.com FAQ

Google computers scan the text of Gmail
messages in order to filter spam and detect
viruses, just as all major webmail services do.
Google also uses this scanning technology to
deliver targeted text ads and other related
information.
 The process is completely automated and
involves no humans.
[Emphasis added.]

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 What do we really care about?

 It’s what goes on in the mind of

human beings that matters to you.

 Most people find it reassuring that

although Google’s computers may be
reading their email no human beings are.

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 We care about meaning —
A computer? With a mind? Nonsense.
So you don’t care if computers read your email.

 which has as something to do with an idea forming

in a mind.

Not the same as formal semantics, i.e., mapping syntax
to models.
 Most people don’t believe it makes sense to say
that an idea has formed in the mind of a computer
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 Berkeley’s question
If a tree falls in a forest with no one around to hear it,
does it make a sound?
His answer: yes because God is there to hear it.

 Our answer (David Chalmers: the hard problem of

AI, subjective experience)
 One must distinguish between physical events and
subjective experience.

If a tree falls in a forest, it generates (what we call)
sound waves.

But if no being has a subjective experience of sound, no
sound will be heard/experienced.
• I agree with Chalmers that we have no idea how to think about
subjective experience and connect it to everything else.

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Berkeley’s question extended
 If a tree grows in a forest with no one aware of it,
is it instantiating the idea of a tree?

 Our answer (the same as before)

 The idea of a tree exists only as subjective experience.

Even if the idea of a tree is exactly the right way to
describe that particular aspect of nature, that idea
exists only as an idea, and it exists only in the mind of
someone who is thinking it.

Ideas exist only as subjective experience.

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 Computations are ideas
When a computer runs is it computing?

A computer is computing only when it is understood to be performing

some externalized mental activity. Otherwise, it’s just an arena
within which electrons are moving about.

 Like ideas, computations are also mental

events.
 But they are mental events that we have externalized
in a way that allow us to use physical processes to
perform them.
 When a tree grows rings, it just grows rings.
 When we use tree-ring growth as a way to count
years—to help us work with ideas such as “a year”—
then we can say that the tree has performed an
10/18/08 (unconventional) computation.
Humans: smart enough to have ideas; foolish enough to believe them. 10
 Thought tools
 A thought tool is a physical device/object that
helps us externalize and work with our thoughts.
 We have developed thought tools in a number of
domains: time (shadows, clocks, etc.), numbers
(abaci, etc.), space (straight edge, compass),
diagrams (Tree of Porphyry), random wisdom
(Lull’s logic machine)
 Thought tools differ in kind from scientific
instruments — microscopes, telescopes, other
instruments of observation.
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Computers and thought tools
 Every computer application is a thought tool
 Its conceptual model represents the thoughts that are
being externalized.
 Domain specific languages formalize how we
think about those domains.
 General purpose programming languages are
languages for building thought tools—and hence
are meta thought tools.
 The most sophisticated work in this area involves
declarative and other advanced programming
language constructs, meta-notations, semantic
and ontology languages, etc.
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Defining Computation physically
 A series of rule governed state transitions
whose rules can be altered.
 Eliasmith, Dictionary of the Philosophy of Mind,
http://philosophy.uwaterloo.ca/MindDict/computation.html.
 Presumably he means state transitions of
physical elements. Otherwise we start in the
mental realm and simply stay there.
 Defines computation as something in and
of the world and independent of us, i.e., a
natural phenomenon of sorts.
 We claim this can’t be the case.
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Defining Computation physically
 Eliasmith claims that if you leave out the
condition that the rules can be altered every
physical system is a computational system,
which makes the definition vacuous.
 Can the transition rules be altered?
 They can’t if we suppose that physical
processes operate according to unalterable
physical laws.
 You can’t change the laws of physics.

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Defining Computation physically
 What do we do when we create a
computation?

We alter the environment within which the laws
of physics operate.
 When we load a program into a computer,
we are altering the environment within
which the CPU (or some virtual machine)
operates.

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 Defining Computation physically
 A physical process is just what it is, a
process.
 When we put objects on a balance scale, is it
performing a computation?

We are altering the environment within which the
balance scale maps states to states.
 But a balance scale is performing a
computation only if we are using it for this
purpose.

Rather than as a designer setting for flower pots.

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Computation is externalized thought
(again)
 For almost all processes, how the process
proceeds depends on environmental
contingencies.
 When we control (or interpret) the contingencies
so that we can use the resulting state transitions
to work with our own thoughts, then the process
is a computation.

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Eliminating the von Neumann middleman

 Computing involves configuring environmental

contingencies within which natural processes will play
themselves out: non-algorithmic computing
 Conventional computation (with real computers) is a (very)
constrained form of unconventional computation.
 We use conventional computation to simulate
unconventional computation.
 A goal of this conference is to eliminate the von Neumann
middle man—to find ways to externalize our thoughts by
mapping them more directly onto the forces of nature.
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Turing Machines as computation?

 Why can’t we look to Turing Machines (and

their equivalents) for a definition of
computation defined independently of
thought?
 Turing Machines, recursive functions, and
their equivalents rely on the notions of
symbols and symbol manipulation, which
are fundamentally mental constructs.

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It’s not the function; it’s the process
 Turing Machines and equivalent models are all defined
constructively, i.e., in terms of the operations one may
perform when constructing a computational procedure.
 A program in one model can be constructively converted to be a
program in another.

Turing Machines and equivalent models are equivalent as
programming languages: they define the same computations.
 Computability theory takes this generic class of software
and applies it to the task of computing functions.

But this step isn’t necessary.
 What’s important about the Church-Turing Thesis is that
Turing Machines, etc. characterize a fundamental mode of
thought: to be considered externalizable a thought process
must, at least in principle, be expressible as a software.

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It’s not the function; it’s the process
 Turing Machines and equivalent models are all defined constructively,
i.e., in terms of the operations one may perform when constructing a
computational procedure.
 A program in one model can be constructively converted to be a program
in another.
 Turing Machines and equivalent models are equivalent as programming
languages: they define the same computations.
 Originally Turing understood his model to be a formalization of what
we mean by an “effective procedure.”
 Computability theory takes this generic class of software and applies it
to the task of computing functions.

But this step isn’t necessary.
 What’s important about the Church-Turing Thesis is that Turing
Machines, etc. characterize a fundamental mode of thought: to be
considered an (externalizable) effective procedure a thought process
must be expressible as a software.

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Wegner’s interactive machines
 Wegner claims that his interactive machines
(basically agents) are more powerful than Turing
Machines.
 We think that’s the wrong question.
 Wegner implicitly takes the same stance that we
take above: to distinguish between the programs
one can write and the functions those programs
can compute.
 The programs are the same; they are “more
powerful” only because they are open with
respect to information flow.
 Iterative PD (open) is more successful than one-shot
PD (closed).
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We think of ourselves as agents
 An environmentally sophisticated agent-based paradigm
involves agents, each of which has the computing
capability of a Turing machine, situated in an
environment that reveals itself reluctantly.
 Such an agent in a real-world environment is like an
Oracle machine, with nature as the oracle.
 We are still talking about effective procedures. It’s just
that the environment within which the procedure
operates may change as the procedure proceeds.
 Real-world, far-from equilibrium agents:

must extract energy from their environment to persist

embody software capable of processing information flows from
the environment
 The agent-based thesis is that this paradigm represents
how, at the start of the 21st century, we think about
ourselves as rational actors.
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