Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic, Where Do New Ideas Come From? How Do They Emerge? Epistemology as Computation (Information Processing)

Dodig-Crnkovic has been inspired by a conference by Chaitin to think about the relationship between epistemology and information theory -- the question of how ideas in mathematics and biology emerge. In a "info-computational" universe the interaction of organisms and their interaction with one another generate persistent patterns that imprint the organisms themselves and create a basis for epistemology.

Dodig-Crnkovic then moves on presenting an overview of "computationalist" thinkers and ideas framing natural process in terms of computational systems, as well as the idea that the types of computation done in nature may go beyond the Turing machine mode.

She then moves to the question of how ideas from organismic computation and computationalism may provide a new framework for epistemology -- the idea that the universe is a computer running on random initial conditions may provide a basis for understanding how cognition emerged in natural evolution.