I just saw this now, so apologies for the late reply: On Saturday, July 20, 2024 at 4:49:40 AM UTC+2 Russell Standish wrote:
Hi Brent - you're just being a bit sloppy with terminology. All universal Turing machines are equivalent computationally, but not all Turing machines are universal. It's a moot point about whether a human can be considered a universal Turing machine - a human's finite lifetime is a problem, so you'd really need to consider something like a society of humans whose organisation extends beyond the finite lifetime of an individual human. Even then, there may well be limits to the amount of computation physically possible in the universe, depending on the universe's geometry (which gets us into Tipler's Omega point theory, for example). This is the standard "infinite tape thus we can't be universal Turing machine argument". I thought It refuted by the fact that a universal Turing machine is a finite machine, as can be verified by the Tables of Turing's publications, that imply description, properties, and code of such machines in Turing's formalism. But there's nothing infinite about them. He used the term "infinite tape" much more weakly in the sense "as long as is required by what the machine is executing". Iirc it is also this finitude that will psychologically predispose UTM's aware of it, to write on cave walls, build libraries, buy new hard drives, or subscribe to cloud services. I don't know if we are UTMs but I thought they were finite machines, which can be expressed in finite manner, working with finite sets of instructions, some of which do not halt. And "death" to such a machine would just appear to be deletion of all local memory. Sort of local amnesia. Acquiring more space for your hard drive... it's also the agenda of all colonialists who attempt the psychological escape of the mortal coil by acquiring more land for more space to configure their memories more favorably towards them. It's what would motivate some to seek out Mars and new planets, or to manifest destiny towards the west and similar. -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/1d3b68f6-f1cc-4e61-abac-1b85df100189n%40googlegroups.com.
