It seems to me that many computer scientists aren't content with using the methods, models, and theories of computation just in computer science, with computers. Success of computational modeling in multifarious areas has lead some computer scientists to a delusion of generality and universality of computation.
Those lured into the delusion of generality want to see the whole world through the computational lense. They want to see the world, society, people, and nature as finite and deterministic. That way everything would be easy to model, predict, and control.
Why is it so easy to believe that everything can be explained computationally?
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Although I have no answer for your question, I am 100% with you. What more, it does not concern only scientists, who might have been under the influence of their field for some time. I learned that also about (cs) students, who will fight to prove that because brain is composed of neurons, and these are connected, we thus can simulate the system and therefore we can simulate the whole human. And there is no way the simulation would fail to describe any natural behavior.
I wanted to add something about cognitive modeling, but that is then another story...
Hmmm....maybe I'm a Wittgenstein freak but Matti, wouldn't it be here a mistake between explanation and description?
Javi, how nice of you that you noticed my choice of words. I spent some time thinking about it.
"Simulated" is definitely too mild a word, so is "modeled". "Represented" is too difficult concept in the philosophy of mind.
I chose explained instead of described to emphasize that some computer scientists truly believe that computational models work as theories of phenomena. The extreme case is, of course, Stephen Wolfram.
Wolfram seems to think his cellular automata are a Theory of Everything. Indeed, they can produce a vast range of behaviours and patterns. However, to be able to build φ is not to understand φ.
That made me remember some words by Csikszentmihalyi in the book where he introduced the "flow" concept (Beyond boredom and anxiety): the idea is not to forget that theories (he was referring to psychological theories) are not reality but they work as if they were reality. An extreme case would be some of the interpretations in quantum mechanics about....epistemology and that what we know about reality is, in fact, an interpretation. [Remember the uncertainty principle]
I think that one reason for computational chauvinism rampant among computer scientists is embodied in the old saying, "if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".
If all you can do is programming, everything looks like a computation.
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