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Hi George,
[SPK]
Are you at all familiar with the work of
Peter Wegner where self-reference is built into his notion of "interactive
computations" by the use of Non-Well Founded Set theory (ala Jon Barwise et
al)?
[SPK]
I agree. My question was somewhat but not
completely rhetorical as it is (or should be obvious) that a complete
description of Einstein's Brain or any other physical object is, at best, a
pipedream. Nevertheless, this idea that there is somehow an identity or
equivalence between a "complete description" of an object and said object
itself that is directly implied by the contemporaty Ai school (ala Dennet,
Churchland, etc.)
It it hard for me, as a student of
philosophy, to bring myself to even consider any discusion or theory that has
this nonsense as its basic tacit premise. Something has to give!
[SPK]
Interesting, we are straying into FoR list
territory! I seem to recall that D. Deutsch poists out that "other times are
other universes" and that "travel" by what ever means between such is severly
constrained to only that which can be subsummed under the umbra of quantum
enteglement.
We seem to, again, stray into ideas
and assumptions that simply do not hold up under strutiny!
[SPK]
Ok, but what about the nature of this
"simulation" as a computational algorithm? How do we obey the definitions of
Universal Turing Machines while considering interactive systems that under most
reasonable conditions will run into situations that never occured to the
person that wrote said algorithm. I am reminded of the difficulty of this
when I watched a news report about a race that was held between robotic
vehicles...
It is not important to note that the winner
of said race:
"Stanley got that smart by learning during countless hours of desert
testing in the months leading up to the race. Equipped with a wide variety of
sensors and a heap of custom-written software including machine learning
algorithms, Stanley grew smarter with practice. Eventually it became a master of
finding the path, detecting obstacles and avoiding them while staying on
course."
This is hardly compatible with UTMs as a
UTM's algorithm must be definable "prior" to the running of the computation
itself. In this case of interactive computation, there is a huge transformation
that takes place, a transformation that we usually call "learning".
So, to get back to the point, it is hardly
a win for the idea of a priori existing algorithms to claim that some how *all*
of the content of a 1st person can be faithfully mapped to some bit string
in Platonia. It takes something more than mere existence for 1st Person content
to occur...
[SPK]
Is it possible to agree with some aspects
of Penrose's claims and arguments without having to be tared witht the same
broad brush? Since we have come to the conclusion (being hopeful!) that
physical objects can not have the purely classical "apriori" definiteness of
properties to the sharp degree that a UTM seems to require (at least in
principle), so why is it that we continue to ignore the fact that this line of
reason leads inevitably to the conclusion that we must treat any object,
including the brain, as quantum mechanical?
If an object is quantum mechanical and is
said to do computing, why do we work so hard to not see these two aspects as
distinct and unrelated? To say nothing of Bruno's goal of deriving
non-comutative QM from sophisticaled variations on classical logics...But I
digree. Please take a look at Wegner's papers and see if you think he is on the
right track.
Onward!
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