The Nature of Physical Computation

Computing systems are ubiquitous in contemporary life. Even the brain is thought to be a computing system of sorts. But what does it mean to say that an organ or a system computes? What is it about laptops, smartphones, and nervous systems that they are deemed to compute—and why does it seldom occur to us to describe stomachs, hurricanes, rocks, or chairs that way? These questions are key to the conceptual foundations of computational sciences, including computer science and engineering, an...