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.
doi:10.1007/s11047-020-09805-3 | full-text view-only version | extended version of UCNC conference paper
@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 )