Bodies — Both Informed and Transformed Embodied Computation and Information Processing

Post-Moore’s Law computing will require an assimilation between computational processes and their physical realizations, both to achieve greater speeds and densities and to allow computational processes to assemble and control matter at the nanoscale. Therefore, we need to investigate “embodied computing,” which addresses the essential interrelationships of information processing and physical processes in the system and its environment in ways that are parallel to those in the theory of embodied cognition. We briefly discuss matters of function and structure, regulation and causation, and the definition of computation. We address both the challenges and opportunities of embodied computation. Analysis is more difficult because physical effects must be included, but information processing may be simplified by dispensing with explicit representations and allowing massively parallel physical processes to process information. Nevertheless, in order to fully exploit embodied computation, we need robust and powerful theoretical tools, but we argue that the theory of Church-Turing computation is not suitable for the task.