Abstract

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in applying mechanistic thinking to computational accounts of implementation and individuation. One recent extension of this work involves so-called ‘wide’ approaches to computation, the view that computational processes spread out beyond the boundaries of the individual. These ‘mechanistic accounts of wide computation’ maintain that computational processes are wide in virtue of being part of mechanisms that extend beyond the boundary of the individual. This paper aims to further develop the mechanistic account of wide computationalism by responding to two outstanding worries, what are called the parsimony and testability challenges. The first is based on considerations about wide computation’s ontological cost; the second the view’s experimental testability. The argument is that wide mechanistic computationalism can gain the necessary conceptual resources to address the challenges by embracing two further aspects of the mechanistic approach: i) the structural aspect of mechanistic explanation and ii) the notion of constitutive relevance.