Is Everything Computation?
Well, I guess this is in the same vein as “everything is information”. To be honest, I think both are just baloney. The reality is whatever it is. When we have to make sense of it, we need a proxy, a way to represent it somehow. We can’t use reality to represent reality as that is not possible: there is only one reality and everything is an individual. No two things can be at the same location at the same time.
So, is everything computation or can be said to be such if we reduce everything to be computational? Sure, why not? Should we? For anything non-biological, I think the answer is yes. For biological things, probably not. Computation can’t account for one thing that is fundamental to reality that is counter to reductionism: emergence. For instance, water flows to lower place, due to gravity. Big deal? Air flows around an obstacle? But seriously, there are tons of phenomena that we know but not understand: we can’t explain them. Not because they are mysterious, but because our methods of explanation is not adequate. Science, mathematics, computation, are all methods of explanation.
Why is biological phenomena not explainable right now? It is because we have no clue about true emergence. It is truly everywhere as it is the fundamental force that allows groups of entities to exhibit characteristics that are not in the individuals. This means reductionism does not work for emergence. On each level of emergence, we can reduce the phenomena into the fundamental level of that level of emergence, not lower. So, we have a gap between two consecutive levels of emergence.
Emergence is everywhere. This is especially true for things made by people or other biological beings. The reason why we have the level of oxygen in the atmosphere is due to organisms in ancient times. Even though it is poisonous. Once we have organisms, how the environment changes is really hard to tell. When we have natural selection ignited, the trajectory of the change is no longer easily predictable.
Is it easy to reduce these things to computation? Yes, but only when it has emerged. Computations can’t account of the emergence itself. That will have to explained by “natural laws”, like Newton’s laws. They are “laws” because they can’t be explained by the scientific method and hence science.
Therefore, computation is useful for explaining things that we already understand. And because of Gödel’s incomplete theorem, basically we have to get outside the realm of what we wish to explain to explain something less than trivial, eventually it is dependent on human’s inborn sensory abilities. What is the colour of ultra-violet? Not a colour for humans. It is totally a colour for many birds. Can we imagine what it is? No. We can represent it, of course, like we have beautiful representation of what James Webb’s Telescope saw. But representation is not reality.
