I think that "psychological time" fits the bill. The observer needs a a temporal dimension in which to appreciate differences between states.
"Physical time" presupposes a physics, which I haven't done in
"Occam".
It is obviously a little more structured than an ordering. A space
dimension is insufficient for an observer to appreciate differences,
isn't it?
Cheers
On Tue, Feb 24, 2004 at 02:11:07PM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
> Hi Russell,
>
> Let me try to be a little more specific. You say in your Occam paper
> at http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks/docs/occam/node4.html
>
> "The first assumption to be made is that observers will find themselves
> embedded in a temporal dimension. A Turing machine requires time to
> separate the sequence of states it occupies as it performs a computation.
> Universal Turing machines are models of how humans compute things, so it is
> possible that all conscious observers are capable of universal computation.
> Yet for our present purposes, it is not necessary to assume observers are
> capable of universal computation, merely that observers are embedded in
> time. "
>
> Are you meaning physical time, psychological time, or just a (linear)
> order? I am just
> trying to have a better understanding.
>
> Bruno
>
>
>
>
>
>
> At 18:00 23/02/04 +1100, Russell Standish wrote:
> >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.)
> >
> >I also suspect that it is not necessary for the evolution of SASes,
> >but this is obvious a debatable point.
--
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