Info-computationalism and Morphological Com- puting of Informational Structure

Within the framework of info-computationalism, morphological computation is described as fundamental principle for all natural computation (information processing). Foundations of a New Science of Computation Present computational machinery evolved from mechanical calculators to electronic machines with vacuum tubes and then transistors, and to integrated circuits and eventually microprocessors. During this remarkable development of hardware towards ever smaller, faster and cheaper devices, the computational principles remained unchanged: an isolated machine calculating a function, executing an algorithm. Such machines were adequately represented by the Turing Machine model. However, computational machinery gradually started to change its character from isolated calculators to networked communicating devices. In the 1970s first networks were created with computers linked together via telecommunications. The emergence of networking involved a changed nature of computers and computing as operating systems and applications started to access and use the resources of each other, exchanging information. Turing Machine model is sequential. As long as parallel processing, such as occurring in networks, is synchronous, it can be sequentialized, and thus Turing Machine model can be applied. However for networks with asynchronous processes Turing Machine is not appropriate. As (Sloman 1996) points out, concurrent and synchronized machines are equivalent to sequential machines, but some concurrent machines are asynchronous. (Dodig Crnkovic 2011) Author's manuscript Chapter in the book Integral Biomathics Published by Springer http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-28111-2_10 pp 97-104