At 10:05 +0200 23/05/2002, Lennart Nilsson wrote: >I might not be on the same side as you and Juergen >Schmidhuber on this, but I AM on the same side as David Deutsch which is >comforting.....
Even comFORting :-) (You know the FOR list I guess). I would say you are on the same side as almost all (if not really all!) physicists. And perhaps you are right of course! Concerning the quantum Landauer explicitely defend the idea that information is physical. I can even accept that a priori the quantum information field adds evidence in that direction. Now it happens that I gave a precise argumentation that IF we take seriously the COMPutationalist hypothesis in the science of mind, THEN Physics is no more a fundamental science, and physics becomes a branch of psychology/computer science/number theory. Now Deutsch explicitly subscribe to comp, so its physics is at best redundant (the Schroedinger Equation SWE should be (and almost be) a theorem of machine possible perception theory), or incorrect. Personaly I don't know, but I'm pretty sure the reasoning and its arithmetical translation is correct (it has been verify by many people). So now it is just a question of comparing the physics extracted from machine's (mathematical) psychology with the physics extracted by nature observation (QM). Unfortunately that leads toward non trivial math. I call the argument UDA (for Universal Dovetailer Argument) and its Arithmetical translation is called now AUDA. See my URL for pointers to it in this list archive. You can maintain physicalism if you want but then you must still explain how mind (qualia and other first person sensation and knowledge) is linked to that physical reality, and with uda/auda you will not succeed without abandonning comp. You can also try to find an error in uda, and I would be glad if you do so. Sincerely. Bruno -- http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/