On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 04:56:00AM -0800, ronaldheld wrote: > http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1101/1101.2198v1.pdf > Any comments? > Ronald
I finally got around to reading. I am completely unimpressed. Two points: 1) His use of Physical Church-Turing Thesis is rather unconventional. Normally, this means that the physical universe is Turing simulable, but he uses it to mean something like COMP or Tegmarks MUH. Note that by Bruno's UDA, the physical universe is no longer simulable if COMP is true! 2) More seriously, I don't buy his Observer Class Hypothesis (OCH). Observers do not just "absorb" information, they model it. In one way, they could be said to search for short algorithms that predict/reproduce the information at hand. So there will only ever be a countable number of observers. They cannot be power sets of the set of information strings. This becomes most absurd when talking about observers observing themselves. Yet the number of information strings in the plenitude will be uncountable (2^\aleph_0). There is an analogous relationship with the concept of computable numbers versus all real numbers. Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Mathematics UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [email protected] Australia http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
