Thanks for your reply, Bruno...
> All this for reasons similar to those made by Everett in his many > world papers. Have you read Everett ? (or at least Tegmark? or > Deutsch?) Just Tegmark. I'm looking into the others... > Is it more impressioning than the (binary) counting algorithm, which > just counts: 0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, etc. It generates (after the > first 1) every strings too. And you can implement it in a reversible > way with a reversible universal turing machine. Well, there may be some reasons to think that cellular automata are more fundamental, computationally speaking, than even Turing Machines. For instance, a Turing Machine has a "moving" part (the read/write head) and usually a complicated state transition table, perhaps requiring a physics all its own. While the cellular automaton has no moving parts at all - just two states and the transition rule. And consider the economy of its description. Suppose you needed to send a computer program to an alien civilization. Describing the workings of a Turing Machine might be a little tricky, while a few simple pictures can convey the idea of a cellular automaton and its initial configuration. Since CA can do everything TMs can do, and because of their simple implementation, I tend to prefer them. >> But the advantage here is that we can more easily envision the >> existence of such a miraculous object like a minimal cellular >> automaton than, say, a Universal Turing Machine. Cellular automata >> naturally implement physical universes without any interpretation. > > How? Implementations are interpretations. Yes, I suppose so. I simply mean that that the cellular automaton has a direct mapping to 3D physical space. It's just easier for me to envision. >> The bits merely exist... and we can see them with our digital eyes >> - and the patterns they generate. > > Where? Well I suppose I was trying to be poetic. :) The cellular automaton, I believe, exists in "Platonic Heaven" as you described it. It really doesn't matter. > It is not the solution. It is the problem. Your type of approach > like Schmidhuber's one is based on a naive association between the > first person view and some third person description (brain, machine, > automata). See http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m1726.html for > an attempt to explain how non trivial the "mind body" problem becomes > when the computationalist hypothesis is taken seriously. Wow, that is quite some post. =) It's almost overwhelming. Can you try to describe, in simple terms: what is the mind/body problem? And how does it relate to cellular automata? I always assumed that the automaton merely exists... and we (our minds and bodies) simply emerge from the bits. Thanks again for your thoughts, Joel
