On 9/10/2024 6:13 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Mon, Sep 9, 2024 at 2:14 PM Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote:
/> I generally agree with John, but I would point out that
computation is a physical process that realizes a mathematical
process. /
*I think it would be more accurate to say it realizes an informational
process because mathematics is just a small subset of logic. In
Boolean arithmetic 1+1 =1. And the very word "process" implies a
procedure that causes a change with the passage of time, but without
physics nothing can change. No matter how good a mathematics book is
it will never change, and if it's just sitting on the shelf and
nothing physical, human or AI, ever reads it then it will not cause
anything else to change either. *
/> Sure it's more complicated because it depends on the physics,
but that is incidental to the computation./
*The particular physics used in a computation is incidental BUT the
use of SOME variety of physics (mechanical gears rods and pulleys,
biological nerves, vacuum tubes, transistors, integrated circuits,
quantum computers etc) is NOT incidental because information is
physical, so if you want to process it mathematics is not enough, you
need physics. If that were not true Nvidia then would go broke as
would the entire semiconductor industry.*
*It's even more abstract than that. Given any sequence of states you
can label them so as to represent a computation. So I think the physics
is really incidental to the computation.
Brent*
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