On 06 Mar 2011, at 14:17, Andrew Soltau wrote:
On 07/02/11 15:22, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Chalmers defines a 'Computational Hypothesis'
You might attribute this to Putnam or Fodor, or many others,
including Galouye. That's CTM. I argue that the
computationalist hypothesis is already in the "King Milinda"
text, which is a greec-hinduist text from before JC.
You can see CTM as an ancestor of the more precise modern comp (TC
+ yes doctor). The "yes doctor" is a belief in a level of
description, where CTM believes implicitlt that we know the level
(neuron level, for example). But as Colin explains we might take
into account the EM fields. I argue that we have to take into
account the glial cells (100 time more numerous than the neurons).
No problem with comp, the level might be as low as the 101000
rational cut of the heisenberg matrix of the milky way at the
dimension of the superstrings.
The Computational Hypothesis says that "physics as we know it is
not the fundamental
level of reality."
Give me the reference.
http://consc.net/papers/matrix.html
(first google hit for Chalmers Computational Hypothesis)
Thanks.
OK, I know that article. I will not explain why I find it rather
unfair in the references, it would involve other people, and no one is
really interested in priority issue. The paper is interesting, and
makes good points. Yet it still misses the point that I am trying to
explain to you (and other people on this list). We will come back on
this.
I will insist on this, though: you cannot quote a reference without
explaining the context:
The statement just before the statement you quoted, i.e.: "the
Computational Hypothesis says that 'physics as we know it is not the
fundamental level of reality'." looks like the consequence of comp.
That's was astonishing for me and that's why I asked you the reference.
But in fact, in Chalmers paper, it is preceded by "The Computational
Hypothesis says: Microphysical processes throughout space-time are
constituted by underlying computational processes."
So, what Chalmers call "The computational hypothesis" is what is
often called "digital physics". It is not the same thing. A priori the
computational hypothesis is incompatible with "digital physics".
Chalmers is a bit ambiguous though, due to the 'computational process'
wording". In my work it is a result that IF I am a machine, then
physics is a (a priori non computable) sum on infinities of
computation, so there are no "underlying computational processes",
except in some extended sense of "underlying".
There is a widespread confusion between digital physics, and the comp
hyp. in cognitive science. Digital physics see the world as a
computation, comp assumes only that "I" is Turing emulable, in the 3-
person sense. Digital physics implies comp, but comp does not imply
digital physics, and imply the negation of digital physics (comp might
be coherent with some notion of "super-digital" physics).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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