Nets of Information and Computation

Dedication This book is dedicated to the memory of two people who most profoundly influenced my worldview: my uncle Anton Dodig, who was the first one to show me the proof of Pythagoras theorem – a magic moment I will never forget, along with his innumerable demonstrations of the effectiveness of logical analysis which taught me the amazing power of reason; and to my mother Jelena whose fascination for chemistry and in particular for experiment inspired my enduring love for scientific exploration. 3 " Technology unveils, transforms, and controls the world, often designing and creating new realities in the process. It tends to prompt original ideas, to shape new concepts, and to cause unprecedented problems. It usually embeds but also challenges ethical values and perspectives. In short, technology can be a very powerful force for intellectual innovation, exercising a profound influence on how we conceptualize, interpret, and transform the world. Add to that the fact that the more ontologically powerful and pervasive a technology is, the more profound and lasting its intellectual influence is going to be. Recall that technology has had an escalating importance in human affairs at least since the invention of printing and the scientific revolution. It becomes obvious why the conceptual interactions between philosophy and technology have constantly grown in scope and magnitude, at least since Galileo's use of the telescope ". (Floridi, 2004) 4 Preface " Theories are nets: only the one who casts will catch. " Novalis We live in a computing universe. It is not only that we are vitally dependent on computers in our work and surrounded by ubiquitous computing in our daily lives. Even the Cosmos nowadays is envisaged as a network of computational processes, the stance known as pancomputationalism or naturalist computationalism. In the complementary outlook, the universe, on its most fundamental physical level, is seen as consisting of information which is a view of paninformationalism or informational structural realism. This book goes a step further and develops a synthetic framework by integrating pancomputationalism and paninformationalism. The universe is perceived as being engaged in the computing of its own future states through physical processes of dynamical changes in the informational structure. Computation is thus in the most general form understood as information processing which can be seen at different levels of informational organization. In spite of the development of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) and availability of all kinds of …