On 20 Apr 2013, at 21:38, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
I am reading now Beyond Mechanism: Putting Life back into Biology.
In Foreword: Evolution beyond Newton, Darwin, and Entailing Law,
Stuart A. Kauffman writes:
p. 9 "Here is the first 'strange' step. Can you name all the uses of
a screwdriver, alone, or with other objects or process? Well, screw
in a a screw, open a paint can, wedge open a door, wedge closed a
door, scrape putty off a window, stab an assailant, be an objet
d'art, tied to a stick a fish spear, the spear rented to 'natives'
for a 5 percent fish catch return becomes a new business, and so on.
I think that we all are convinced that the following two statements
are true: (1) the number of uses of a screw driver is indefinite;
and (2) unlike the integers which can be ordered, there is no
natural ordering of the uses of a screw driver. The uses are
unordered. But these two claims entail that there is no 'Turing
Effective Procedure' to list all the uses of a screwdriver alone or
with other objects or processes. In short, there is no algorithm to
list all the uses of a screwdriver."
Any comment?
That is not an argument for putting life back into biology, but for
putting life out of computers or arithmetic, based on a lack of
knowledge in computer science. Why? because most properties of
programs and machines are beyond effective procedures. For example,
given an arbitrary program, there is not effective procedure to know
if it computes x+y or not.
More similar to this screwdriver problem: there is no effective
procedure to decide what an arbitrary universal machine will do with
some code.
Machines already know that most of machines' properties analysis are
*far* beyond machines. Like us, they can make bet and theories, but
none will be complete.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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