On 12/9/2011 2:47 AM, meekerdb wrote:
On 12/8/2011 6:35 PM, Stephen P. King wrote:
On 12/8/2011 9:01 PM, meekerdb wrote:
On 12/8/2011 5:48 PM, Stephen P. King wrote:
On 12/8/2011 6:45 PM, meekerdb wrote:
On 12/8/2011 3:04 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Dec 8, 4:44 pm, "Stephen P. King"<stephe...@charter.net> wrote:
On 12/8/2011 4:22 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
To suppose computation requires a material process would be
materialism, wouldn't it?
Hi Craig,
Not quite, a dualist model would require that some form of
material
process occur for computations and would go even further in
prohibiting
computations from not having a physical component but would not
specify
which it was. This way we preserve computational universality
without
having to drift off into idealism and its own set of problems.
True, it could be dualism (or an involuted monism) too, but I
wouldn't
call a theory of mind which depends on material processes
computationalism.
You might if you thought that's all that was needed to make a
mind, in contrast to some supernatural soul stuff. It basically
boils down to whether you suppose there are some things that are
real (e.g. some things happen and some don't, or some stuff exists
and some doesn't) and some aren't or you suppose that everything
happens and exists. In the latter case there's really no role for
ur stuff whose only function is to mark some stuff as existing and
the rest not.
Brent
Hi Brent,
Interesting role that you have cast the physical world into,
but ironically "stuff whose only function is to mark some stuff as
existing and the rest not" and "everything happens and exists" do
not sleep together very well at all. The "everything happens and
exists" hypothesis has a huge problem in that is has no way of
sorting the "Tom sees this and not that" from the " from "Dick sees
this and not that" and "Jane sees this and not that", where as the
"stuff whose only function is to mark some stuff as existing and
the rest not" can be coherently defined as the union of what Tom,
Dick and Jane see and do not see.
The idealists would have us believe that along with numbers
their operations there exists some immaterial stratifying medium
that sorts one level of Gedel numbering from another. I am reminded
of a video I watched some time ago where a girl had three sealed
jars. One contained nothing, one contained 4 6-die and the third
contained 1,242,345,235,235 immaterial 6-die. ...
The physical world is very much real, even if it vanishes when
we look at it closely enough. But we might consider that just as it
vanishes so too does the ability to distinguish one set of numbers
from another. If the ability to distinguish this from that itself
vanishes, how are we to claim that computations exist "independent
of physics"? Seriously!?!
Where did I claim that. I was just pointing out the genesis of
"everything theories"; you did notice that this is called the
"everything-list" didn't you?
Brent
HI Brent,
I commented on what you wrote. Care to respond or will you beg my
question? How does immaterial based "everything theories" deal with
this problem that I just outlined?
You should ask a proponent of such theories; like Bruno. But as I
understand it, the ultimate application of Ocaam's razor is to refuse
to make any distinctions, so that we theorize that everything exists.
But the unqualified everything doesn't seem to be logically coherent.
So Bruno backs off to an "everything" that is well defined and still
possibly comprehensive, i.e. everything that is computable. Within
this plenuum there are various states (numbers in arithmetic) and some
principle will pick out what part we experience. Computation includes
an uncountable infinity of states and relations between states - so
whatever we experience must be in there somewhere.
I'm intrigued by David Deutsche's assertion that different physics
implies that different things are computable, but I'm doubtful that
it's true.
Brent
Hi Brent,
What is the basis of your doubt? Have you not looked at, for
instance, the work of Tipler
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_J._Tipler#The_Omega_Point_cosmology>
that discusses how different physics alters the kinds of computations
that can occur? The notion of Hypercomputation
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercomputation> is a good place to
start. My agreement with Deutsch's assertion does not follow from just
taking his words as authority. Consider a physical would in which the
Plank constant was zero, Newton's universe for example; in such a world
computations would be radically different if only because there do not
exists any stable atoms. All computers would be sporadic and stochastic
Boltzmann type computers. Would the same kind of universality that we
have with our Turing thesis exist in such? The paper tape and read head
would not have any physical support in the sense that its continuous
existence over an arbitrary number of operations.
Onward!
Stephen
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