[wrongc0ntinent]

Re: "claiming that things that compute are somehow categorically different is an appeal to magical thinking" - This is not the case. The distinction that's being made is one of perspective and purpose, i.e. implementing method to get result. Or am I getting this wrong?

[hyperion2010]

You are getting it correct, but the idea that computation is defined based on some purpose or from a limited subset of all perspectives is exactly what I take issue with. If your notion of computation is dependent on purpose and thus some teleological notion of function then saying something computes doesn't tell us anything about that being, only about how human beings perceive that being and its function. Again, this undermines the usefulness of having a perspective/function independent notion of computation. The magical thinking arises because we project our notations of function onto the being itself and conflate our uses for that being with the intrinsic properties of that being. Purposes/uses/functions are not intrinsic properties. Computation may not be an intrinsic property, it may only be a relational property, which would be an interesting result itself, but probably quite irritating to people who want to make arguments that there is something intrinsically different about certain kinds of systems.