On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 06:28:58PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > On 27 May 2015, at 17:48, John Clark wrote: > > >On Wed, May 27, 2015 Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote: > > > >>> The Church-Turing thesis says something about intelligence but > >not consciousness, it says that any real world computation, like a > >intelligent action, can be translated into a equivalent program on > >a Turing machine. > > > >> Church thesis does not invoke ideas of real-world computation > > > >Wrong yet again. From Wolfram Mathworld, the makers of Mathematica: > > > >"The Church-Turing thesis (formerly commonly known simply as > >Church's thesis) says that any real-world computation can be > >translated into an equivalent computation involving a Turing > >machine. In Church's original formulation (Church 1935, 1936), > >the thesis says that real-world calculation can be done using the > >lambda calculus, which is equivalent to using general recursive > >functions." > > > >http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Church-TuringThesis.html > > > >> This is either a confusion between [...] > > > >Obviously somebody around here is very confused indeed! > > > Citing Wolfram is a per-authority argument. That is not valid. > > The expression "real-world" is ambiguous, what does it mean? > > A function computable by a physical device, > > A function intuitively computable, or mechanically computable, that > is having some algorithm describable in some language. > > Better read the original papers. Buy the cheap Davis books in the > Dover edition. His book "computability and unsolvability" is quite > good, and the Dover edition contains his paper on the Hilbert 10th > problem, leading to (Turing) Universal Diophantine Polynomial. >
I would probably have to side with John Clark here - in Platonia, hypercomputers such as David Deutsch's example of the Hilbert Hotel are possible, so the CT thesis really is saying something about what is physically possible, not what is mathematically possible. By definition, COMP assumes the CT thesis, so already the ontology is constrained from what is potentially possible in abstract mathematics. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 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.
