On Thu, Nov 03, 2005 at 12:39:27PM -0800, "Hal Finney" wrote: > Russell Standish writes: > > Lack of convincing is perhaps due to lack of understanding. Even I do > > not fully understand the true worth of my "derivation". It seems to me > > that I show that any physical theory that takes into account > > observation must have that Hilbert space structure, with that form of > > the Born rule. Yet there may well be special conditions that nobody > > has yet spotted that limit the claims. OTH, it cannot produce > > something like the classic Schroedinger equation for the hydrogen > > atom, which as we know must be strictly false as it ignores > > relativistic effects. > > What about other universes, such as Conway's Life universe? It has > nothing like QM. Does your argument predict that life is impossible > in Life? We know that it is possible to create computers there - I > think self-replicating machines as well. Can we really argue from such > general premises that there is no way that living organisms could exist > in that universe? > > I am skeptical that we can reach such strong and specific conclusions > from such broad and general assumptions. > > Hal Finney
It predicts that either a) there is no conscious life in a GoL universe (thus contradicting computationalism) or b) the physics as seen by conscious GoL observers will be quantum mechanical in nature. If one could establish that a given GoL structure is conscious, and then if one could demonstrate that its world view is incompatible with QM then we might have a contradiction. Even then, there is still a loophole. I suspect that 3D environment are far more likely to evolve the complex structures needed for consciousness, so that conscious GoL observers are indeed a rare thing. I don't know if this is the case or not, but if true it would make a GoL example irrelevant. More interesting is to look at some 3D CA rules that appear to support universal computation - Andy Wuensche had a paper on this in last year's ALife in Boston. No arXiv ref I'm afraid, but you could perhaps email him for an eprint... Cheers -- *PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which is of type "application/pgp-signature". Don't worry, it is not a virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you may safely ignore this attachment. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 8308 3119 (mobile) Mathematics 0425 253119 (") UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australia http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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