On Epistemically Useful Physical Computation

Abstract

Piccinini’s Usability Constraint states that physical processes must have “physically constructible manifestation[s]” to be included in epistemically useful models of physical computation. But to determine what physical processes can be implemented on physical systems (as parts of computations), we must already know what physical processes can be implemented on physical systems (as parts of processes for constructing computing systems). We need additional assumptions about what qualifies as a building process. Piccinini implicitly assumes a classical computational understanding of executable processes, but this is an assumption imposed on physical theories and may artificially limit our picture of epistemically useful physical computation.