On Sat, Oct 25, 2014 at 12:17:34AM -0400, John Clark wrote: > On Fri, Oct 24, 2014 at 7:19 PM, Russell Standish <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > > > > >> Bruno's argument shows that they must be a part of the phenomenal > > (experienced) world if COMP is true. > > > > > > >> OK then "comp" is false. And now that we know that "comp" is false > > what's the point of talking about it anymore? > > > > > So you know for certainty that the arrival times of electrons in a > > Geiger counter from a beta decay source is computable. How? > > > > Although I don't know it for certain I strongly suspect that beta decay is > not computable, I think it's random; but I think it could provide at best > a few dozen digits not a infinite number of digits that the Real Numbers > require. But never mind, if you want it to be true then "comp" is true, or > if you prefer it to be false then "comp" is false. I won't fight you over > it because I don't give a damn about "comp" one way or the other. >
If you sample the Geiger counter every second, and ask the question "has an electron triggered the counter in the previous second", one gets a sequence of zeros and ones, that is bounded only by the length of time we're prepared to continue performing this operation. This is not a "few dozen digits at best" that you claim. The sequence is, as you concur, likely to be not computable, and COMP predicts that such sequences should exist phenomenally. If beta decay arrival times proved to be computable, as (for example) Juergen Schmidhuber suggests, it would actually be a serious blow to COMP, though not quite fatal as we may find some other sequence in nature that is random. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 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.
