Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) / quote 137 of 171
Are computations real or epistemic tools?
In philosophy, cognitive science, and, more broadly speaking, in computer science, there is a divide between those who believe that computations underlie physical reality—and that human consciousness is made of information, reducible to information, or caused by it—and those who believe that computations are human inventions—useful models or epistemic tools that are convenient descriptive strategies. But crucially for the anti-computationalist, information and computations do not play any causal role in anything because information is not real. This division is often much more implicit than explicit.