Shubhang Goswami’s Reviews > Physical Computation: A Mechanistic Account > Status Update

Piccinini lays out the requirements (desiderata) for what it means to compute on chapter 1, argues existing accounts do not satisfy them for 3 chapters (chap 2-4) , then argues that computation should be explicated mechanistically on Chapter 5. Introduces the notion of "functional mechanism" and now finally introduces his account of "what does computation really mean?" on Chapter 7.

This build up is long, really wants you to shed all other arguments and views about computation before diving into the meat. Requires patience.

So far, it has been a complete bashing and breakdown of what traditionally you would think of computation and what it means in the physical sense. I guess the idea is break all the current arguments and then pick up the pieces and construct a new version of what it means for something to compute. Very dense read.