Abstract:

We have developed abstraction/representation (AR) theory to answer the question “When does a physical system compute?” AR theory requires the existence of a representational entity (RE), but the vanilla theory does not explicitly include the RE in its definition of physical computing. Here we extend the theory by showing how the RE forms a linked complementary model to the physical computing model. We show that the RE does not need to be a human brain, by demonstrating its use in the case of intrinsic computing in a non-human RE: a bacterium.

@article(StepneyKendon-2020-RE,
  author = "Susan Stepney and Viv Kendon",
  title = "The representational entity in physical computing",
  journal = "Natural Computing",
  volume = 20,
  number = 2,
  pages = "233-242",
  doi = "10.1007/s11047-020-09805-3",
  year = 2021
)