Hi Colin, I'm having a read through your paper now, and have a few comments to keep the juices of debate flowing on this list.
Firstly, I'd like to say well done - you have written a very clear paper in what is a very murky subject. I have two comments right now - but I haven't finished, so there could well be more. 1) Your definition of COMP is more along the lines of Deutsch's physical Turing principle, or Thesis P. Wikipedia seems to call it the strong CT thesis. It is important to note that it is a stronger assumption than Bruno's COMP assumption, and indeed Bruno has already given a proof that physics cannot be computable - so you might be proving the same thing via a different method. Nevertheless, I haven't seen yet whether weakening your definition of COMP invalidates your argument though 2) A few times through the text you make remarks along the lines of "it might appear that laws of nature might still be accessible by an extreme form of the randomized-search/machine-learning approach, even though it is obvious that human scientists do not operate this way." "Obvious"? It is far from obvious. What you say flies directly in the face of Popper's "Conjectures and Refutations", and you would face a horde of angry Popperians if you were to post this stuff on the FoR list. Anyway, I'll keep reading. Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
