Do tell, I love fractals and strange attractors and all that, if that is what you are referring to. It would be interesting perhaps to hear a hypothesis on consciousness related to fractals.
No it has nothing to do with fractals, sorry.
At the physical level, a
computation is when the state of one system changes attraction spaces because of the attraction space some other system is in, all else being equal.
Consider a simple set of two molecules that are interacting. Each molecule, A and B, is a system in its own right -- system A and system B.
The aggregation of particles that make up a molecule has an infinite number of states that they might possibly take but nevertheless there are certain
attractor states ( or sets of states, since attractors don't need to be a single state ) that "define" what the configuration of the particles will settle to, all else being equal. For example, a stable molecule like benzene has an attractor which corresponds to the ideal benzene ring -- all else being equal, the particles in the benzene molecule stay in a state that is within the
attraction space of that ideal benzene ring attractor. They can vibrate all they want, and orbit each other, and bump into each other, and do all the stuff that particles do, but nevertheless their configuration as a whole remains.
If you add some molecules that benzene can react with, or add energy that can lead to a change, or remove energy, whatever, and the benzene molecule
changes such that we would now call it a different chemical, well now the particles are in a state that corresponds to a
different attractor, perhaps something like a benzene ring with stuff attached, or maybe the ring decomposed into two other molecules, whatever. They are now in a different
attraction space. When the benzene ring reacted, the particles of the system
changed attraction spaces.
This should be obvious. What might not also be obvious, though, is that if there is some other particle system -- some other molecule, in our example -- that
also changes attraction spaces because of the particles in the benzene changing attraction spaces, something special has happened. A
computation has occurred. Because molecule B doesn't need to behave in any of the ways that molecule A does in relation to the environment, yet molecule B is still affected by those relationships. If there is too much heat energy, and molecule A reacts, molecule B might change behavior as well -- even if molecule B doesn't change behavior due to heat energy.
Conceptually, molecule B "uses" molecule A to partition the infinite amount of environmental states to a much smaller set of
classes of states. Every state where molecule A doesn't react is one class, and molecule B is behaving one way if the environmental state is of that class. Every state where molecule A has reacted is another class, and molecule B behaves another way if the environmental state is of that class instead.
So with only two systems, you should be noticing a pattern of complexity
reduction:
( infinite environmental state ) --> ( finite number of attraction spaces in system A ) --> ( even smaller number of attraction spaces in system B ).
And that, fundamentally, is
computation. It shouldn't be hard to imagine putting about a trillion extra steps of complexity reduction in there and ending up with the simple binary behavior of you deciding to turn left instead of right on your way home from work despite the fact that the environment around you is in one state out of an
infinite number of possibilities. How does that infinite possibility reduce to a simple binary choice on your part? The complexity reduction of computation.
The thing is, what silicon computers do is also just complexity reduction, using the same principles. The computations that take place because of the transistors of computers is just as much based on changing attraction spaces as the computations that take place because of the biochemical molecules in your cells. And that is why anyone that actually understands physics and biology -- hopefully, most of the neurobiologists out there -- are supporters of the computational model.
EDIT -- this should also dispel the strawman of "since computation is everywhere, and not everything is conscious, then computation must not be the root of consciousness" because it should be obvious that a dozen steps of complexity reduction, such as what you might find in a rock, don't lead to the same behavior as a few trillion steps, such as you might find in a conscious human.
