On 26 Jul 2015, at 20:58, meekerdb wrote:
On 7/26/2015 4:16 AM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
David Deutsch has some things to say which are relevant to
discussions of computationalism.
http://edge.org/conversation/constructor-theory
"One of the first rather unexpected yields of this theory has been
a new foundation for information theory. There's a notorious
problem with defining information within physics, namely that on
the one hand information is purely abstract, and the original
theory of computation as developed by Alan Turing and others
regarded computers and the information they manipulate purely
abstractly as mathematical objects. Many mathematicians to this day
don't realize that information is physical and that there is no
such thing as an abstract computer. Only a physical object can
compute things."
But what does it mean to "be a physical object". It's only having a
complex of relations to other objects that exhibit certain
regularities. Is a computer simulation of a stone a "physical
object"? No, because you can't kick it and it can't kick back. But
a simulation of you in the computer can simulate kicking the
simulated stone and the simulated you can experience the simulated
kick back. So if there's a whole world simulated in the computer it
doesn't need any interpretation or reference to the computer
substrate - it's a physics that is abstract from the computer point
of view, but from within the the simulation it's concrete.
Excellent point Brent. And it is what makes elegant the comp
explanation, when we get the point that RA's semantic emulate a
universal dovetailer, and so arithmetic emulates all emulations
possible, on all input possible on all (Turing) oracle possible.
Of course, by the FPI, that leads to the measure problem, for which
the (ideally sound) universal machines themselves, when introspective
enough to know that they are universal (the Löbian machines), provide
the logic of the measure one, on which we get the "Goldblatt quantum
modal quantizations", which gives quantum logic whre the UDA says it
should be, confirming that it might be interesting to pursue the
interview (at the least).
Bruno
Brent
And later:
"Several strands led towards this. I was lucky enough to be placed
in more than one of them. The main thing was that starting with
Turing and then Rolf Landauer (who was a lone voice in the 1960s
saying that computation is physics—because the theory of
computation to this day is regarded by mathematicians as being
about abstractions rather than as being about physics), Landauer
realized that the concept of a purely abstract computer doesn't
make sense, and the theory of computation has to be a theory of
what physical objects can do to information. Landauer focused on
what restrictions the laws of physics imposed on what kinds of
computation can be done."
"The notion of a purely abstract computer doesn't make sense!" I
find myself to be sympathetic with this view.
Bruce
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