On Sun, Sep 28, 2014 at 12:33 PM, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
> Bit the *way* you are stuck in step 3 makes me think that you have your > religion about all this > Wow, calling a guy known for disliking religion religious, never heard that one before, at least I never heard it before I was 12. >> Not all analog machine can be computable, some things are not >> computable. Turing proved that not all numbers are computable, > > > > I guess you mean "real number". > No I do not. I don't just mean numbers that can't be expressed as fractions, and I don't mean transcendental numbers life PI or e that are not the solution to any polynomial equation, I mean non computable numbers, that is numbers for which there is not a infinite sequence or a algorithm of any sort that can even approximate them. Turing proved that all non computable numbers are real but not all real numbers are non computable, although nearly all of them are. >> except for random number generators every analog machine human beings >> have ever made is computable. >> > > > Not sure about that. I read that soap bubbles in some lattice can > generate non computable surface "theoretically" at least. OK, > > No natural phenomenon has ever been found where nature has solved a > NP-hard problem in polynomial time. As for the soap bubble thing the key > word is "theoretically", Scott Aaronson actually tried it and this is what > he reports: > > " taking two glass plates with pegs between them, and dipping the > resulting contraption into a tub of soapy water. The idea is that the soap > bubbles that form between the pegs should trace out the minimum Steiner > tree — that is, the minimum total length of line segments connecting the > pegs, where the segments can meet at points other than the pegs themselves. > Now, this is known to be an NP-hard optimization problem. So, it looks like > Nature is solving NP-hard problems in polynomial time! > > Long story short, I went to the hardware store, bought some glass plates, > liquid soap, etc., and found that, while Nature does often find a minimum > Steiner tree with 4 or 5 pegs, it tends to get stuck at local optima with > larger numbers of pegs. Indeed, often the soap bubbles settle down to a > configuration which is not even a tree (i.e. contains “cycles of soap”), > and thus provably can’t be optimal. > > The situation is similar for protein folding. Again, people have said that > Nature seems to be solving an NP-hard optimization problem in every cell of > your body, by letting the proteins fold into their minimum-energy > configurations. But there are two problems with this claim. The first > problem is that proteins, just like soap bubbles, sometimes get stuck in > suboptimal configurations — indeed, it’s believed that’s exactly what > happens with Mad Cow Disease. The second problem is that, to the extent > that proteins *do* usually fold into their optimal configurations, > there’s an obvious reason why they would: natural selection! If there were > a protein that could only be folded by proving the Riemann Hypothesis, the > gene that coded for it would quickly get weeded out of the gene pool." > > By the way I just finished reading Scott Aaronson's book "Quantum > Computing since Democritus" and it's excellent. > > And not only that but the fundamental laws of physics tell us that every >> machine we or anybody or anything else will ever build will also be >> computable. >> > > > Again, that is not so easy, because nature might exploits real numbers > Nobody has ever seen nature due this and if a quantum theory of gravity actually exists then nobody ever well because that would mean that spacetime is quantized and nature wouldn't even recognize real numbers. > We have evidence that we can reduce biology to chemistry, and chemistry > to physics > Yes but then what, does physics reduce to mathematics or does mathematics reduce to physics? For example, if nature never uses real numbers to decide what to do next can it even be said that real numbers exist? I don't think anybody knows enough to answer that question, I know that you don't. >> If it goes both ways then it's more than a correlation and that's what >> we've got in this case. Change the brain and the mind always changes. >> Change the mind and the brain always changes. And that is why nobody needs >> to assume computationalism (not to be confused with "comp") because we >> already know for a fact that it's true. > > > > At which substitution level? > I don't understand the question. >The problem with computationalism, is that it needs to assume some level > of description, to encapsulate the finiteness of information content of the > teleportation beam. So comp truncates the person > I don't know about "comp" but if nature never has to deal with a infinite number of anything then in computationalism that beam hasn't truncated anything. > you do very bad science and/or bad religion > Wow, calling a guy known for disliking religion religious, never heard that one before, at least I never heard it before I was 12. John K Clark -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
