On 8/29/2018 4:04 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
On Wednesday, August 29, 2018 at 4:55:12 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:
Do you have some evidence for doubting CT? It seems that it's
essentially a definition of digital computation. So you could offer
some other definition, but it would need to be realisable.
Brent
On 8/29/2018 12:12 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
> also thought by some in what I call the UCNC gang
Also thought WHAT?
In terms of theory, Joel David Hamkins @*JDHamkins*
<https://twitter.com/JDHamkins> (the set-theorist now at Oxford)
considers infinite-time TMs to be a part of "computation":
http://jdh.hamkins.org/ittms/
If computation is the fundamental "substrate" of nature, and ITTMs
are "natural" extensions of TMs, there is no reason to exclude ITTMs.
But what does the presence of ITTMs mean for the CT thesis? Whether
ITTMs are "realizable" remains to be seen.
In terms of practice, UCNC people think that computers made with
non-standard materials, e.g. "live" bioware produced by synthetic
biology, could have novel computational (behavioural) abilities not
equivalently replicable in a simulation.
And John Searle thinks only wetware can be conscious. The question is,
do they have evidence for this? After all a simulation can go all the
way down to subatomic level. There's nothing in principle requiring it
to stop at the neuron level, although that's where most AI researchers
assume the information processing happens.
Brent
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