----- Original Message ----- From: "Dwayne Monroe" <idoru345 at yahoo.com>
DENNING: Our older definition is like saying that biology is the study of phenomena surrounding the microscope, or astronomy is the study of phenomena surrounding the telescope. How odd this sounds! It sounds odd because we recognize that the microscope and the telescope as tools to study life and the universe. So it is with computation. Suppose that information processes already exist in nature, and the computer is our tool for studying them? David Baltimore is one of first scientists to say that computation occurs naturally; many have since followed.
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In "the West", before the cosmos was a computer it was a clock and before that it was an organism. Anybody else recognize problems?
Suppose instead that information and computation are simply categories that are/will become Procrustean beds...
Ian