On Sun, Sep 28, 2014 at 1:04 PM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> >> Computationalism is the theory that the human brain is a computer, a > type information processing machine, and it postulates that thinking is a > form of computing. But you can't have a brain or a computer or a machine of > any sort without matter. > > > Computer have been discovered in arithmetic. Gödel was close in his 1931 > paper, but missed it, but then it is clear in Post, Church, Turing paper. > Turing made his machine looking more "physical" but it is still a purely > mathematical objects, and computations are too. > So over the last few decades was it a big waste of time and money to spend trillions of dollars and millions of man-hours to make computers out of matter? I don't think so. Maybe computers really do exist in some sort of ethereal Platonic abstract plane, maybe they're real but apparently they're not quite real enough to get the job done here on planet Earth. > You don't need the notion of matter in computer science, unless you are > interested in the implementation of computer in some physical reality. Then > you need some physics to define what this means. But this does not mean > that physics is primary. > As I've said no natural phenomenon has ever been found where nature must solve a NP-hard problem to figure out what to do next, if the so called real numbers are really real I find it difficult to understand why that is the case. John K Clark > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
