CRITIQUE OF COMPUTATIONAL REASON IN THE NATURAL SCIENCES
Umile Giuseppe Longo · Advances in computer science and engineering · 2009
In this text, we will attempt to shortly highlight certain constitutive principles of the particular form of knowledge provided by the digital machine, the modern computer, in its relationship to Mathematics (from which it originates) and to the Natural Sciences (Physics and Biology). Our basic thesis is that the historical and conceptual richness of the theory which enabled the concrete realization of this extraordinary type of machine is far from being neutral or transparent with regard to reality. Specifically, we will see that the digital machine proposes causal structures and the breakings of symmetry which generate them as being the central structures of the intelligibility of nature. This will enable to point out a distinction between “imitation and “modeling in terms of simulation or formalization, and therefore enable to highlight the limits and the potentialities of digital simulation. 1 From the alphabet to the machine The extraordinary innovation to which we are confronted today is a machine which is the result of a very specific historical evolution. This machine did not exist “before”, in the way in which there were no mammals on earth 300 million years ago. It is within the evolutive system’s dynamic, which constantly produces novelty, that mammals emerge: nothing miraculous, only a very complex mixture between invariance and variability, continuity and change, which are in part random, and in part not yet properly classifiable into current physical categories of determination. In a similar or more complex fashion, human history develops, and within it, with a continuity / discontinuity which is rich in terms of common practices, of language, and of symbolic culture, we invented this machine, which is in the process of changing the world. Such a machine is the culminating point of a very specific process which begins with language, but