English

Pancomputationalism: Theory or metaphor?

Other Computer Science 2025-06-17 v1

Abstract

The theory that all processes in the universe are computational is attractive in its promise to provide an understandable theory of everything. I want to suggest here that this pancomputationalism is not sufficiently clear on which problem it is trying to solve, and how. I propose two interpretations of pancomputationalism as a theory: I) the world is a computer and II) the world can be described as a computer. The first implies a thesis of supervenience of the physical over computation and is thus reduced ad absurdum. The second is underdetermined by the world, and thus equally unsuccessful as theory. Finally, I suggest that pancomputationalism as metaphor can be useful.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.13263,
  title  = {Pancomputationalism: Theory or metaphor?},
  author = {Vincent C. Müller},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.13263},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

At the Paderborn workshop in 2008, this paper was presented as a commentary to the relevant paper by Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic "Info-Computationalism and Philosophical Aspects of Research in Information Sciences"

R2 v1 2026-07-01T03:19:15.637Z