On 31 Mar 2013, at 16:16, John Clark wrote:
On Sat, Mar 30, 2013 Joseph Knight <[email protected]> wrote:
> True or False: COMP implies that any fundamental physical constant
is non computable?
I still don't know exactly what "COMP" means
It is the hypothesis that there is a level of description of your
brain such that your consciousness (or first person experience) would
remain unchanged in case your brain, or body, is replaced by a
computer emulating it at that level, or below.
It is the idea that your brain is a machine, even if natural and
physical.
but about 1860 Maxwell computed the speed of light and that is
certainly a fundamental constant, not only that but his mathematics
said that computed speed of light would always be the same
regardless of the speed of the observer or of the source of the
light. But of course Maxwell didn't start from zero, he had to know
what the values of the magnetic constant and the electric constant
are, and as far as we know those numbers can only be obtained from
experiment. At the time electricity and magnetism didn't seem to
have anything to do with light but Maxwell showed that they did.
Getting number by experiment does not provide information on the
computability issue of some possible constant occurring in physics.
Most mathematical constants are computable or reductible to computable
functions on the non negative integers, and individual non computable
object occur mainly in mathematical logic and theoretical computer
science.
Bruno
John K Clark
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