Title: Computation in the Physical World

Speaker: Professor John Symons

Chair: Professor XING Taotao

Time: 08 OCT, 2019, 15:10-18:00

Place: Classroom 406, Second Teaching Building, PKU

Abstract: In the 1980s Hilary Putnam argued against computational functionalism. As part of his argument he claimed to have provided a proof that any physical object can implement any finite state automaton. This strange assertion implies, for example, that a rock can be said to compute any piece of software. Philosophers have responded with a variety of objections to Putnam’s argument and have proposed alternative accounts of computation that avoid what has come to be called the triviality objection to computationalism. In this talk, I examine the accounts of physical computation that have been offered to date and propose an alternative definition of physical computation. On my account a physical computer is a system that reliably solves a computational problem. I explain what a computational problem is and what it means for a system to solve it reliably.