Digital computation is deeply ingrained in our society, yet when it comes to understanding their nature and impact on our culture and science, we only seem to see the tip of the iceberg. In this week’s reading, Simon Penny brings up what he calls the “key issues” in the era of computationalism: how our culture keeps assuming the power of computing without solid theorization, and how the nature of arts practices are separate from computation.
In the academic STEM fields there is a clear segmentation of the fields into subdomains to ensure their modularity aiming for a certain computable goal. However, Simon Penny argues that this fragmentation implies the dualism between the computation and its materiality. This particular nature by the means of cartesianism has a chain effect causing the invalidation of the computation by separating the mind from its body. Separating the senses, hardware serving as the primary inputs to its computable mind would cause its structure to collapse by suppressing its foundations. Another assumption on the nature of computation in comparison with the human intelligence is that we tend to assimilate two fundamentally different processes. Such idea implies that our human brain - like the computer - can process in an enclosed, immaterial environment separate from the outside world; the “human brain is a computer” theory is a veiled dualist argument that should be criticized. At the end of the reading, one question remains in our group: Is the computer functioning dualistically (i.e., is the computational processing separated from its physical body) and how its functioning makes us question our own cognitive process?
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