The Mode of Computing
This is a foundational theoretical proposal for understanding computing across machines and natural systems, with implications for AI and consciousness studies.
The paper proposes a new system level called 'The Mode of Computing' to generalize Newell's hierarchy and capture diverse computing forms, including natural computing in brains, suggesting it could help solve the hard problem of consciousness.
The Turing Machine is the paradigmatic case of computing machines, but there are others such as analogical, connectionist, quantum and diverse forms of unconventional computing, each based on a particular intuition of the phenomenon of computing. This variety can be captured in terms of system levels, re-interpreting and generalizing Newell's hierarchy, which includes the knowledge level at the top and the symbol level immediately below it. In this re-interpretation the knowledge level consists of human knowledge and the symbol level is generalized into a new level that here is called The Mode of Computing. Mental processes performed by natural brains are often thought of informally as computing process and that the brain is alike to computing machinery. However, if natural computing does exist it should be characterized on its own. A proposal to such an effect is that natural computing appeared when interpretations were first made by biological entities, so natural computing and interpreting are two aspects of the same phenomenon, or that consciousness and experience are the manifestations of computing/interpreting. By analogy with computing machinery, there must be a system level at the top of the neural circuitry and directly below the knowledge level that is named here The mode of Natural Computing. If it turns out that such putative object does not exist the proposition that the mind is a computing process should be dropped; but characterizing it would come with solving the hard problem of consciousness.