You tackle "what is X?" questions by trying to get a deeper understanding of how the phenomenon works, not by coming up with a definition. For a long time huma

You tackle "what is X?" questions by trying to get a deeper understanding of how the phenomenon works, not by coming up with a definition. For a long time humanity has been interested in understanding what physical matter is, and progress on that has been made by understanding how the phenomena actually works, rather than by trying to define what matter is. I would suggest that people are assuming that, since there appears to them that there is disparate computational phenomena, asking "what is computation?" must just talking about the definition of a term. But perhaps we just need to get a clearer understanding of these cases and we'll see that there is just the one kind of thing going on in all of them. I don't think anyone has any evidence to suggest it couldn't be like this.