Comments interspersed.
On Sun, Jan 18, 2004 at 07:15:45AM -0500, Kory Heath wrote:
>
> I understand this perspective, but for what it's worth, I'm profoundly out
> of sympathy with it. In my view, computation universality is the real key -
> life and consciousness are going to pop up in any universe that's
> computation universal, as long as the universe is big enough and/or it
> lasts long enough. (And there's always enough time and space in the
> Mathiverse!)
Computational universality is not sufficient for open-ended evolution of life. In fact we don't what is sufficient, as evidenced by it being an open problem (see Bedau et al., Artificial Life 6, 363.)
How do you know then that comp universality is not sufficient? (Giving that comp universality entails the non existence of a complete theory of comp-universality; I mean computer science is provably not completely unifiable; there is no general theory for non stopping machines or non stopping comp processes). Are you thinking about something specific which is lacking in comp universality?
I also suspect that it is not necessary for the evolution of SASes, but this is obvious a debatable point.
Are you saying that "comp" is entirely irrelevant to explain the origin of life, the origin of the universe(s) ?
Bruno
