On 11 May 2012, at 13:10, Hector Zenil wrote:
Information that readers may find interesting:
Stephen Wolfram has written the first in a series of blogs posts about
NKS titled "It's Been 10 Years; What's Happened with A New Kind of
Science?":
http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/05/its-been-10-years-whats-happened-with-a-new-kind-of-science/
Stephen will also be hosting an Ask Me Anything (AMA) on Reddit, where
he will be taking questions about NKS and his research program on
Monday, May 14 at 3pm EST.
I think it is a good opportunity to start an interesting discussion
about several topics, including of course information and computation.
It looks like advertising for a type of universal system, the cellular
automata. They are certainly very interesting, but such system are
harder to use to reflect about the first person / third person
distinction, crucial in our matter.
The fundamental theories have to be machine independent, and the
classical study of the ideally self-referentially correct machine,
seems to me more informative for the question relating the first
person points view to the third person points of view. It helps to
formulate the questions, even if in toy situation.
This already suggest why our "physical" neighborhoods seem to be
emulable in polynomial time only by a quantum computer.
Using Wolfram type of approach for fundamental studies, is a form of
digital Aristotelianism.
It does not work. It assumes mind-body identity thesis which
contradict computationalism. It takes for granted a conception of
reality hardly sustainable both with the facts, and with what comp
predicts machine's facts can possibly be.
Digital physics implies computationalism, but if you take the 1/3
person points of view distinction into account, computationalism
entails a non digital physics. So digital physics is conceptually
erroneous.
See the references in my URL for a proof of that statement. You need
only Church's Turing thesis, and the assumption that consciousness is
invariant for *some* digital transformation (which follows from
computationalism).
This does not preclude that cellular automaton are very interesting,
and can have many applications, but it is not clear to make it into a
new science. We want to ask what about that science is, for it does
not seem to address the most fundamental questions.
Bruno Marchal
Sincerely.
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