> just about everything can be reduced to computation, This is not a precise statement. What is meant by "reduced" and "computation?" "Computation" in often us

> just about everything can be reduced to computation, This is not a precise statement. What is meant by "reduced" and "computation?" "Computation" in often used in a hand wavy manner similar to how some people use "economics" to gobble up everything. Computation as defined in computer science is, first and foremost, not an objective phenomenon, only a formal model (inspired or meant to formalize "effective methods") that can be simulated using various natural phenomena, but primarily using pen and paper. But there is nothing objectively computational going on in those natural phenomena. An abacus is not counting. A mechanical computer isn't adding. An electronic computer isn't really computing, because there is no objective phenomenon known as computation, except as a mental operation. We call something a computer for only one reason: it can be interpreted in a computational manner. Another feature of computation models is that they are formalizations. Formalization, by definition, involves "desemantification", leaving us with a residue of gutted forms and some syntactic rules to work with. Formalization lends itself to mechanization. I am reminded of an adjacent observation of Russell's on the subject of physics. Physics intentionally ignores everything about reality that doesn't yield to mathematical description. That's part of the method, and indeed, a good deal of the particular success of physics, and the physical sciences in general, is due to this approach. To declare that physics is all there is is shear selection bias. You confine your investigation to only those things that physics can handle, and then declare that, because physics has been successful handling such things, physics is all there is.