On 10/22/2012 5:50 PM, Russell Standish wrote:
Schmidhuber does not consider ontology at all. He merely asks the
question "What if we're living inside a universal dovetailer?".
Hi Russell,
That is an ontological question in my thinking, but I will not
quibble this point.
He doesn't ask what the machine running the dovetailer is made of, nor
what the programmer that sets the machine is motion is made of. These
can be taken as literal or figurative as one likes, as they have no
impact on the conclusions.
OK. I am reading hisftp://ftp.idsia.ch/pub/juergen/coltspeed.pdf
<ftp://ftp.idsia.ch/pub/juergen/coltspeed.pdf> now.
In his second paper,
Which one is that? http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/everything/
<http://www.idsia.ch/%7Ejuergen/everything/> ?
he considers the question, what if the great programmer has limited
resources? I'm not sure I really follow him there - a dovetailer
running on a finitely resourced machine is no longer universal.
I disagree, it is still capable of universality but it is a bounded
version of universality. I accept physical functional equivalence within
bounds of equal quantities of resources, but to take this to the limit
of no resources or ignoring physical resources altogether is going to
far into metaphysics for some. I am OK with it, but I demand that if we
are going to neglect the physical then we must be consistent: we cannot
carry into Platonia anything that requires supervenience on physical
process. We simply cannot talk about cake and cake not exist!
Also, computational runtimes should be invisible to the denizens of
the computation, as Bruno points out in his UDA.
Sure, but, to us entities that are asking questions about the
general properties of computations, runtimes do matter! For example, if
we ask if computational simulation of A and computation simulation of B
are capable of having an arbitrary long string of bisimulations between
individual actions within their respective simulations, then there is an
issue of synchrony between them that is sensitive to runtimes. Try
modeling the interactions of banking customers and ATM machines such
that the account totals are always up to date and correct. The single
computer model fails miserably! This is the problem of concurrency that
most "theoretical" computer scientists fail to recognize even as existing.
Independence of runtime properties only follow if we are
considerign the goings-on of the inside of a single computational
simulation that is generating all aspects. I am trying to distinguish
between these two possibilities, single vs. multiple and separable, as I
see the singular computation hypothesis (which Bruno's UDA seems to
assume) as deeply problematic - it implies inescapable solipsism for the
1p of such. For example, what does a "plurality of minds" mean in a
universe where there is a single computation "running" everything?
--
Onward!
Stephen
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