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We discuss two different ways that the term “analog” (as opposed to “digital”) is used in the methodology of computer science and those engineering disciplines that are related to computer science. We show that formal models of computation on real numbers provide, indeed, an explication of w...

Distinguishing between physical systems that compute and those which do not requires an explanation that posits the relation between the formal concept of computation and the physical implementing system. There is confusion about how an answer to the implementation question is to be articulated lead...

It is shown that supposedly paradigmatic examples of classic architecture do not contain local representations. In particular, Turing Machines (TMs) carry out transformations over sub-symbols where only the initial and final states may involve interpretable strings. In contrast, examples of computin...

Recent research in cognitive neuroscience has uncovered so-called neural manifolds that play a central role in explanations of behavior. Revealed through the use of a range of dimensionality reduction techniques, these manifolds are entities in low-dimensional spaces contained in high-dimensional ne...

This note scouts a broad class of explanations of central importance to contemporary computer science. These explanations, which I call 'limitative' explanations, explain why certain problems cannot be solved computationally. Limitative explanations are philosophically rich, but have not received th...

In recent years, a new generation of scholars have begun searching for physical signatures of computation. That is, they have begun investigating what it takes for a physical system to implement a computation with unprecedented attention to the scientific practices involving computation, including c...

According to the robust mapping account we propose, a mapping from physical to computational states is a legitimate basis for implementation only if it includes only physical states relevant to the computation, the physical states have enough spatiotemporal structure to map onto the structure of the...