On 6/10/2015 4:00 AM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 10 Jun 2015, at 02:41, Bruce Kellett wrote:
Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 09 Jun 2015, at 15:11, Bruce Kellett wrote:
Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 09 Jun 2015, at 09:11, Bruce Kellett wrote:
Why not? If it can emulate a specific purpose Turning machine, it can emulate a
universal Turing machine. I think Putnam's argument for unlimited
pancomputationalism implies this.
I am not convince by that argument. Show me a rock program computing the prime
numbers.
Show me a Turing machine that can compute the prime numbers
Easy but tedious, and distracting exercise.
Show me how to emulate just K, that is the function which send (x, y) to x. it is not
obvious this can be done, because y is eliminated, you need a black hole for it, and
a proof that it does not evaporate.
You are becoming a physicalist, Bruno!
You seem to be concerned by Landauer's principle, and the difficulty of eliminating
physical information. This is not a problem for a Turing machine. It is a finite state
machine, so define one state as (x,y) and another as (x). Then the operation when the
machine finds itself in the state (x,y) is to move to the state (x). Not a problem.
Even a rock can do it!
How? The physicist in me is pretty sure that there is no K, nor S, in the
physical core.
But I could agree that with pebble, we can argue that we can implement an approximation
of K.
But not of much more complex program. If you believe that, you will first need to show
me how you read and retrieve the information for the rock, and how the rock computes.
Digital computation is just a sequence of states. With the rock, as we warm it gradually
(by the sun, or in the fire), it passes through a sequence of states. We identify these
correctly to give whatever computation you want. This is the basic pan-computationalism
thesis -- everything is a computation, and everything is a computer.
Which is why I think we need interaction with the world in order to ground a computation
relative to that world.
Brent
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