The Lambda Calculus has been invented at roughly the same time as the Turing Machine (mid-1930ies), by Alonzo Church. And if you understood it, you might end up with a much better intuition of computation. It might look frighteningly mathematical from a distance (it has a greek letter in it, after all!), so nobody outside of academic computer science tends to look at it, but it is unbelievably easy to understand. The Lambda Calculus does exactly the same thing, but without wheels to cloud your vision. (A Turing Machine, doing more harm than good. Many may have heard of Turing Machines, but these things tend to do more harm than good, because they leave strong intuitions of moving wheels and tapes, instead of what it really does: embodying the nature of computation.
Unfortunately, most people outside of programming and computer science don’t know exactly what computation means.
If the universe/the mind/the brain/bunnies/God is explicable in a mechanical way, then it is a computer, and vice versa. The term computation does just this: it defines exactly what machines can do, and what not. For millennia, philosophers have struggled when they wanted to express or doubt that the universe can be explained in a mechanical way, because it is so difficult to explain what a machine is, and what it is not. Why is it so important? Because computationalism is the new mechanism. If there is one highly underrated concept in philosophy today, it is computation.
The Lambda Calculus for Absolute Dummies (like myself)
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