All art can be described via programs
I like the articulation of computationalism in this talk by Joscha Bach. This particular setup starts with a somewhat Cartesian premise: that all of phenomenological experience is a virtual artifact of a cognitive (information) process. The model for classical computation describes a process where some initial information is iteratively evolved according to a set of predefined rules (computation over a program).
Marrying these two ideas leads you somewhere close to seeing conscious experience as a computational process over transduced information signals produced by some apparently non-random information generating context (the universe). In the abstract, the premise can be reduced to something like Descartes’ cogito, ergo sum, but by breeding in concepts and theories from information theory and computation, we have a promising way to formally approach the understanding of consciousness: we can try to discover and implement (or maybe more interestingly, learn) the algorithm for conscious experience on the mechanical computers we’ve built so far. Computationalism offers a view of consciousness where a correct hypothesis is necessarily demonstrable.
A less eternal, but still very fascinating consequence of this interpretation is that all of art at the subjective level is virtual information interpreted in the mind (photons exciting electrical impulses in the retina, local atmospheric density oscillations that pass through a geometric fourier transform in the cochlea interpreted by the brain as electrical impulses over a frequency space, haptic signals mapped over the spatial domain of a humanoid).
If we also entertain the premise that the pattern generating universe is also a computer (i.e. virtualizable), and if everything’s classical, we can use our manufactured machines (laptops, PCs, graphics cards, etc.) and software constructs to describe information processes that can, in principle, generate any conceivable human perception. One can from there, find some sense of artistry from creating algorithmic descriptions that express understanding of, and manipulations for, the tricks that are human perception. This is the central principle driving the industry called Virtual Reality, i.e. to create the Matrix, or Descartes’ evil genie – a program whose output is human experience.
References
Descartes, Meditations
(1641)
I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgement. I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things.
Joscha Bach, The Ghost in the Machine
(Dec 2018) https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-10030-the_ghost_in_the_machine