On 2/27/2014 1:35 PM, Russell Standish wrote:
On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 01:34:32PM +0000, David Nyman wrote:
http://edge.org/conversation/constructor-theory
I don't recall if the list has discussed these ideas of David Deutsch
recently. The link is to an Edge interview in which he discusses his view
that mathematicians are mistaken if they believe that information or
computation are purely abstract objects. He says that both are in fact
physical, but to justify that assertion we may need deeper principles of
physics than the existing ones. He proposes constructor theory as a
candidate.
Implications for comp (or anything else for that matter)?
When I last took a look at constructor theory, it wasn't much of a
theory. I know David's been working on it, when he's not doing the
chat show circuit, but hadn't heard any major development in it
announced, so haven't taken another look. Do you have any papers on
it?
AFAICT, "physical information" is really talking about the fact that
information has "physical" consequences, such as heat dissipation and
entropy change. But if you consider that statistical physics can be
completely formulated in terms of information theory, that is not
surprising.
But in terms of "micro-physics", ie the reversible stuff described by
classical, unitary quantum or relativistic physics, concepts such as entropy
and information are meaningless. And once you do add these concepts,
all you are doing is expanding physics to describe observers, the
process of observation, and abstract things like "semantics".
An expansion not to be sneezed at. :-)
Brent
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
