On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 11:23 PM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote: > On 11 May 2012, at 13:10, Hector Zenil wrote: > > Information that readers may find interesting: > > > Stephen Wolfram has written the first in a series of blogs posts about > > NKS titled "It's Been 10 Years; What's Happened with A New Kind of > > Science?": http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/05/its-been-10-years-whats-happened-with-a-new-kind-of-science/ > > > Stephen will also be hosting an Ask Me Anything (AMA) on Reddit, where > > he will be taking questions about NKS and his research program on > > Monday, May 14 at 3pm EST. > > > I think it is a good opportunity to start an interesting discussion > > about several topics, including of course information and computation. > > > It looks like advertising for a type of universal system, the cellular > automata.
Coincidently, Wolfram wrote today (http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/05/living-a-paradigm-shift-looking-back-on-reactions-to-a-new-kind-of-science/): "Looking through reviews, there are some other common themes. One is that A New Kind of Science is a book about cellular automata—or worse, about the idea (not in fact suggested in the book at all) that our whole universe is a giant cellular automaton. For sure, cellular automata are great, visually strong, examples for lots of phenomena I discuss. But after about page 50 (out of 1280), cellular automata no longer take center stage—and notably are not the type of system I discuss in the book as possible models for fundamental physics." People keep repeating what other say about others... (in this case, that his view is all about cellular automata). ... > Digital physics implies computationalism, but if you take the 1/3 person > points of view distinction into account, computationalism entails a non > digital physics. So digital physics is conceptually erroneous. > > See the references in my URL for a proof of that statement. You need only > Church's Turing thesis, and the assumption that consciousness is invariant > for *some* digital transformation (which follows from computationalism). > > This does not preclude that cellular automaton are very interesting, and can > have many applications, but it is not clear to make it into a new science. > We want to ask what about that science is, for it does not seem to address > the most fundamental questions. Then perhaps you can ask him next Monday on his Reedit session. I think he has some concerns about the place of observers in a digital world scenario. As for computationalism, he as I do, think that the question is about physics, the answer won't come therefore from a model of math or computation. > > Bruno Marchal > > > > > > Sincerely. > > _______________________________________________ > > fis mailing list > > fis@listas.unizar.es > > https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis > > > http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ > > _______________________________________________ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
