On Computing
The Philosophical Gap Between Computer and Medical Science
An essay on the philosophical gap between computer science and medical science — between the machine that computes and the body that lives. It asks what is lost in the translation when we describe a mind as if it were a processor, and what the two sciences each see that the other cannot. Within the On——ing series it is one of the more pointedly analytic entries, using a concrete disciplinary contrast to open a wider question about whether the felt fact of being alive can ever be captured by computation. The gap it names is a cousin of the explanatory gap that runs through the whole corpus.
The gap it names between machine and body is a near relation of the explanatory gap that gives the book One Step Short its title, and reading the two together sharpens both. This essay's contribution is to make that gap concrete, by holding two working sciences side by side and showing exactly where they fail to meet.
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