In David Deutsch's Beginning of Infinity chapter 8, he criticises Schmidhuber's Great Programmer idea by saying that it is giving up on explanation in science, as the hardware on which the "Great Program" runs is unknowable.
David, why do you say that? Surely, the question of what hardware is implementing the Great Simulators simply becomes uninteresting, much like the medieval arguments about the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin. It is unknowable, and it doesn't matter, as any universal machine will do. The second question I have to David is why you say "The whole point of universality is lost if one conceives of computation as being somehow prior to the physical world."? I do appreciate that mathematically, hypercomputers exist, an example being the infinity hotel example you give in your book. So a consequence of something like Schmidhuber's theory is that hypercomputers can never exist in our physical world. I suppose you would say that if physics were generated by machine, why the class of Turing universal machine, and not some hyper-(hyper-) machine? Whereas in a physics-first scenario, physics can only support Turing computation. Surely though, we can reverse the question in the physics-first case - why can't physics support hypercomputation? Cheers I'm copying this to the everything-list, as people there are interested in this topic too. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales 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.
