Alan Turing's Legacy: Info-Computational Philosophy of Nature

TL;DR

This paper introduces Natural Info-computationalism, a contemporary natural philosophy inspired by Turing's work, emphasizing computation as physical processes that produce real-time behaviors and underpin complex systems in nature.

Contribution

It develops a unified framework combining informational structural realism and natural computationalism, extending Turing's legacy to include inanimate and living systems through morphological computing.

Findings

Provides a new framework for understanding nature as informational and computational.

Enables study of complex self-organizing adaptive systems.

Supports modeling of life, intelligence, and cognition through infocomputational tools.

Abstract

Alan Turing's pioneering work on computability, and his ideas on morphological computing support Andrew Hodges' view of Turing as a natural philosopher. Turing's natural philosophy differs importantly from Galileo's view that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics (The Assayer, 1623). Computing is more than a language of nature as computation produces real time physical behaviors. This article presents the framework of Natural Info-computationalism as a contemporary natural philosophy that builds on the legacy of Turing's computationalism. Info-computationalism is a synthesis of Informational Structural Realism (the view that nature is a web of informational structures) and Natural Computationalism (the view that nature physically computes its own time development). It presents a framework for the development of a unified approach to nature, with common interpretation of inanimate nature as well as living organisms and their social networks. Computing is understood as information processing that drives all the changes on different levels of organization of information and can be modeled as morphological computing on data sets pertinent to informational structures. The use of infocomputational conceptualizations, models and tools makes possible for the first time in history the study of complex selforganizing adaptive systems, including basic characteristics and functions of living systems, intelligence, and cognition.