Rudy Rucker on Computation and Death
Speaking of time, how long does a computation continue?. We won’t impose any bound at all. Certain kinds of computation will indeed signal when they’ve arrived at a desired result --- for instance by beeping or by printing a result --- and then halt in the s ense of no longer changing their states. But there’s a sense in which such computational processes continue after their halting point. It’s just that after they halt they remain in a constant state.
For a computer that’s supposed to calculate a number, halting, is usually viewed as a good thing, but for a living being --- which is also a kind of computation --- halting has the bad connotation of death. Most naturally occurring computational processes are things that we like to keep going as long as possible.