Computation

Description

Benjamin Bratton:

"Computation is calculation as world ordering; it is a medium for the complexification of social intelligence.

Computation takes the form of planetary infrastructure that remakes philosophy, science, and society in its image.

How does Antikythera define computation? For Turing, it was a process defined by a mathematical limit of the incalculable, but as the decades since his foundational papers have shown, there is little in life that cannot be modeled and represented computationally. This process, like all models, is reductive. A map reduces territory to an image, but that is how it becomes useful as a navigational tool. Similarly, computational models and simulations synthesize data in ways that demonstrate forms and patterns that would be otherwise inconceivable.

As a rules-based, output-generating operation, computation has general and specific definitions, including biological analogical processing of very local information and Universal Turing machines, general recursive functions, and the defined calculations of almost anything at all.

Antikythera presumes that computation was discovered as much as it was invented. It is not so much that natural computation works like modern computing devices but rather that modern computing devices and formulations are quickly evolving approximations of natural computation—genetic, molecular, neuronal, etc.

Computation as a principle may be near universal, but computation as a societal medium is highly malleable. Its everyday affordances are seemingly endless. However, computational technologies evolve, and societies evolve in turn. For example, in the decades to come, what is called “AI” may no longer be simply a novel application for computation but its primary societal-scale form. Computation would be not just an instrumentally focused calculation but the basis of widespread non-biological intelligence.

Through computational models, we perceive existential truths about a great many things: human genomic drift through history, the visual profile of astronomic objects millions of light-years away, the extent of anthropogenic agency and its climatic effects, the neurological foundations of thought itself… The qualitative profundity of these begins with a quantitative representation. The math discloses reality, and reality demands new philosophical scrutiny."

(https://research.antikythera.org/)