Cover; Half title; Title page; Copyright information; Table of Contents; List of Figures; List of Tables; Contributors; Preface; Introduction; 1 Computability Theory and the Church-Turing Thesis; 2 Computational Complexity Theory; 3 Quantum Computing; 4 Computational Implementation and the Physical Church-Turing Theses; 5 Landauer's Principle and the Thermodynamics of Computation; 6 Chapter Summaries; Part I The Computability of Physical Systems and Physical Systems as Computers; 1 Ontic Pancomputationalism; 1.1 Introduction; 1.2 Forms of Ontic PC and their Empirical Claims

1.2.1 Digital Ontic PC1.2.2 Quantum Ontic PC; 1.3 The Metaphysical Component of Ontic PC; 1.3.1 Weak Simulationism; 1.3.2 Strong Simulationism; 1.3.3 Computational Pythagoreanism; 1.4 Conclusion; Acknowledgments; 2 Zuse's Thesis, Gandy's Thesis, and Penrose's Thesis; 2.1 Introduction; 2.2 Zuse's Thesis: The Universe is a Computer; 2.3 Gandy's Thesis: Turing Computability is an Upper Bound on the Computations Performed by Discrete Deterministic Mechanical Assemblies; 2.4 Is the Physical World Computable?; 2.5 Penrose's Thesis: Uncomputability and the Brain; 2.6 Summary; Acknowledgments

3 Church's Thesis, Turing's Limits, and Deutsch's Principle3.1 Hilbert's Mathematical Forms; 3.2 From a Logical Point of View; 3.3 Struggling to Make Sense of Church's Thesis; 3.3.1 Human Limits and Natural Law; 3.3.2 Computability and Unsolvability; 3.3.3 Stretching Human Limits; 3.4 From a Physical Point of View; 3.5 The Universal Computer; 3.5.1 Quantum Computability; 3.5.2 Computability and Predictability; 3.5.3 Mathematical Forms and Physical Meaning; 3.5.4 The Computability of Nature and the Nature of Computability; Acknowledgments

Part II The Implementation of Computation in Physical Systems4 How to Make Orthogonal Positions Parallel: Revisiting the Quantum Parallelism Thesis; 4.1 Introduction; 4.2 The Mechanistic Account; 4.3 The QPT; 4.4 Common Ground; 4.5 MBQCs; 4.6 MBQCs and the QPT; 4.7 Are the QPT and the OF-QPT Explanatory?; 4.8 Conclusions; Acknowledgments; 5 How is There a Physics of Information? On Characterizing Physical Evolution as Information Processing; 5.1 Introduction; 5.2 Why is There a Physics of Information?; 5.2.1 The Challenge of Landauer's Principle; 5.2.2 The Challenge of Quantum Computing

5.2.3 The Challenge of Quantum Information5.2.4 The Challenge of Exotic Models of Computation; 5.2.5 The Challenge of Different Physics; 5.2.6 What is the Basis of Resource-Cost Claims?; 5.3 The Ambiguity of Representation; 5.4 Quin-Criteria; 5.4.1 Quantum Computing and DiVincenzo; 5.4.2 Landauer's Principle and Maroney; 5.4.3 Unconventional Computation and Horsman et al.; 5.4.4 The Final Five Criteria; 5.5 Information and the Physically Embodied Agent; 5.5.1 Boltzmann's Laptop Falls into a Black Hole; 5.6 What Makes a Someone?; 5.6.1 Epistemic Communities of Agents; 5.7 Conclusion