Roles for Morphology in Computation
Ron Chrisley · 2017
first_page settings Order Article Reprints Font Type: Arial Georgia Verdana Font Size: Aa Aa Aa Line Spacing: Column Width: Background: Open AccessAbstract Roles for Morphology in Computation † by Ron Chrisley Centre for Cognitive Science, Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK † Presented at the IS4SI 2017 Summit DIGITALISATION FOR A SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY, Gothenburg, Sweden, 12–16 June 2017. Proceedings 2017, 1(3), 182; https://doi.org/10.3390/IS4SI-2017-04096 Published: 9 June 2017 (This article belongs to the Proceedings of Proceedings of the IS4SI 2017 Summit DIGITALISATION FOR A SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY, Gothenburg, Sweden, 12–16 June 2017.) Download Download PDF Download PDF with Cover Download XML Versions Notes The morphological aspects of a system are the shape, geometry, placement and compliance properties of that system. On the rather permissive construal of computation as transformations of information, a correspondingly permissive notion of morphological computation can be defined: cases of information transformation performed by the morphological aspects of a system. This raises the question of what morphological computation might look like under different, less inclusive accounts of computation, such as the view that computation is essentially semantic. I investigate the possibilities for morphological computation under a particular version of the semantic view. First, I make a distinction between two kinds of role a given aspect might play in computations that a system performs: foreground role and background role. The foreground role of a computational system includes such things as rules, state, algorithm, program, bits, data, etc. But these can only function as foreground by virtue of other, background aspects of the same system: the aspects that enable the foreground to be brought forth, made stable/reidentifiable, and to have semantically coherent causal effect. I propose that this foreground/background distinction cross-cuts the morphological/non-morphological distinction. Specifically, morphological aspects of a system may play either role. Publisher's Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. © 2017 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Share and Cite MDPI and ACS Style Chrisley, R. Roles for Morphology in Computation. Proceedings 2017, 1, 182. https://doi.org/10.3390/IS4SI-2017-04096 AMA Style Chrisley R. Roles for Morphology in Computation. Proceedings. 2017; 1(3):182. https://doi.org/10.3390/IS4SI-2017-04096 Chicago/Turabian Style Chrisley, Ron. 2017. "Roles for Morphology in Computation" Proceedings 1, no. 3: 182. https://doi.org/10.3390/IS4SI-2017-04096 Find Other Styles Note that from the first issue of 2016, MDPI journals use article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here. Article Metrics No No Article Access Statistics Multiple requests from the same IP address are counted as one view.