Hi, Jason, and let me join the 'welcoming' members.
(I have no intention to join the professional discussion (Wei Dai et al.) -
what can a former polymer chemist say in it, who's 'scientific'
career.concentrated in times before the expansion of the computer-usage,
anyway? )
Mark brought my name into your thread so I want to explain what I THINK Mark
might have been referring to (I really do not try to outguess him<G>)
Mark wrote in his post:
"... >Furthermore I am beginning to wonder if the apparently
> 'straight' and clear cut boundaries to concepts and so forth are not
> merely figments of my imagination. I don't think I go anywhere as far as
> John M. in this but then maybe that is just because I fear to let go of
> my sceptical reductionist walking stick. :-)..."
How far do I think I do go?
In my 5 decades of polymer and technology R&D I arrived at an agnostic
point: to consider common sense instead of the (so far) discovered epistemic
mass in human (scientific??) cognitive inventory. The ever increasing
knowledge-base means a reduced basis for any consciously performed
computation with the already given (known) conditions. (Cf: Robert Rosen's
unlimited interconnection- based complexity with its Turing non-emulable
impredicativity).We just don't know (yet?) everything that may be relevant.
Our concept-identifications are formed by the past knowledge-base (from
millennia ago to the preceding second) which is in congruence (in my mind)
with Mark's reductionist walking stick.(maybe 'not quite' the figments of
the imagination).
I believe in further epistemic enrichment and so whatever we can include NOW
as parameters into our computations will be "improved" later on. I don't
know how Wei Dai's "unbounded memory spread over unbounded space" may work.
but by common sense I hold on to our present ignorance (vs.'later' learning
more) as a support for Mark's uncertainty against our existing 'clear cut'
concepts.
"I just don't know" (=we are by far not omniscient) is that "all the way" I
go for.
Final (unrestricted) conclusions in ongoing reductionist sciences sound
hollow.
I cannot help to compare them with earlier 'conclusions' that had to be
changed - and THEN I apply strong induction for the unforeseeable changes
our present wisdom will undergo over future epochs.
People involved in practical developmental work should not listen to me.
John Mikes
On 1/14/07, Wei Dai <weidai.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>
>
> Jason wrote:
> > If that is true then my underlying assumptions were flawed. My
> > argument assumed that a non-reversible universe could not be simulated
> > by a computer with bounded memory and using only reversible
> > computations. The way I arrived at this assumption was imagining a
> > non-reversible universe, such as the John Conway's game of life. If
> > the computer that implements this simulation has limited memory then in
> > order for the simulation to continue forever, prior states cannot be
> > saved in memory and instead old states would have to be overwritten.
> > This destruction of information which cannot be undone would be
> > logically irreversible as I understand it. However if the simulation
> > were one where each state has a 1 to 1 mapping, overwritting old states
> > does not destroy them forever because previous states could always be
> > computed from the current state.
>
> Ok, I understand your argument more clearly now. But, why do you assume a
> computer with bounded memory? Even with a finite amount of energy, we can
> (theoretically) obtain unbounded memory by spreading it over an unbounded
> volume of space. I'd guess that in practice this has approximately the
> same
> level of difficulty as achieving an unbounded number of computations from
> a
> finite amount of energy.
>
>
>
>
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Received on Sun Jan 14 2007 - 17:18:26 PST