>> You have not convinced me that you can do anything a computer can't do. >> And, using language or math, you never will -- because any finite set of >> symbols >> you can utter, could also be uttered by some computational system. >> -- Ben G
I have the sense that this argument is not air tight, because I can imagine a zero-knowledge proof that you can do something a computer can't do. Any finite set of symbols you utter *could*, of course, be utterable by some computational system, but if they are generated in response to queries that are not known in advance, it might be arbitrarily unlikely that they *would* be uttered by any particular computational system. For example, to make this concrete and airtight, I can add a time element. Say I compute offline the answers to a large number of problems that, if one were to solve them with a computation, provably could only be solved by extremely long sequential computations, each longer than any sequential computation that a computer that could possibly be built out of the matter in your brain could compute in an hour, and I present you these problems and you answer 10000 of them in half an hour. At this point, I am going, I think, to be pursuaded that you are doing something that can not be captured by a Turing machine. Not that I believe, of course, that you can do anything a computer can't do. I'm just saying, the above argument is not a proof that, if you could, it could not be demonstrated. ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=117534816-b15a34 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
