On Tue, Aug 21, 2018 at 1:16 AM <[email protected]> wrote: > I've been looking at the Wiki article on this topic. I find that I really > don't understand what it is, or why it's important. Maybe a few succinct > words from the usual suspects can be of help. TIA. > > >
Bruno provided a great definition and background of the Church-Turing Thesis. I will try to answer why it is important and comes up often in our discussion. The Church-Turing thesis says that anything that is computable is computable by any computer. In other words, there is nothing that the computer in your cell phone can't compute, that your laptop or that a super computer (or even a quantum computer) can. It just comes down to having enough time and memory. This is why you don't need to buy a new phone with new hardware every time you want to install a new app. Regardless of the type of CPU in your phone, it can be extended in its power of what it might compute only given some new software. It is in this sense that computers are "Universal", they are universal in the same sense that of a universal remote, or in the sense that a record player is a universal sound imitating device. A record player might emulate the sounds of an orchestra, Britney Spears, whale songs, etc., all it needs is the appropriate record and it can produce the sound. In the same sense, all a Turing Machine (computer) needs to imitate (or emulate) the right program or function is the right software. Because of this, anything that can be described in software, be it a brain emulation, an AI, a virtual environment, a virtual machine or operating system, can never know what hardware is running it, because the Church-Turing thesis says that any computer is capable of running it. This is why if consciousness is computable (the computational theory of mind) we cannot know what is computing us (e.g. we could be in a matrix type simulation for all we know). The other implication is that if computations exist in mathematics (and they do), then we exist within mathematics. Mathematics (or at least the part necessary to describe computations) becomes the fundamental science of what we experience and what is possible to experience or what we may predict about our future experiences (physics). Jason -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
