Bruno marchal writes:
> Le 23-janv.-07, à 06:17, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :
>
> > Simplistically, I conceive of computations as mysterious abstract
> > objects, like
> > all other mathematical objects. Physical computers are devices which
> > reflect
> > these mathematical objects in order to achieve some practical purpose
> > in the
> > substrate of their implementation. A computer, an abacus, a set of
> > fingers,
> > pencil and paper can be used to compute 2+3=5, but these processes do
> > not
> > create the computation, they just make it accessible to the user. The
> > fact that
> > 2 birds land on a tree in South America and 3 elephants drink at a
> > watering hole
> > in Africa, or 2 atoms move to the left in a rock and 3 atoms move to
> > the right
> > is essentially the same process as the abacus, but it is useless,
> > trivial, lost in
> > randomness, escapes the notice of theories of computation - and
> > rightly so.
> > However, what about the special case where a more complex version of
> > 2+3=5
> > on the abacus is conscious? Then I see no reason why the birds and the
> > elephants
> > or the atoms in a rock should not also implement the same
> > consciousness, even
> > though there is no possibility of interaction with the outside world
> > due to the
> > computation being lost in noise. What this really does is destroy the
> > whole notion
> > of physical supervenience: if you shot the elephants or smashed the
> > rock, the
> > computation could as easily spring from the new noise situation. Thus,
> > it would
> > appear that consciousness comes from computation as pure mathematical
> > object,
> > and is no more created by the physical process that addition is
> > created by the
> > physical process. Either that, or it isn't computational at all.
>
>
> OK, so we do agree.
>
>
>
> >
> >> The real question is not "does a rock implement computations", the
> >> question is "does a rock implement computations in such a way as to
> >> changed the relative measure of my (future) comp states in a relevant
> >> way?" And for answering such question we need to know what a rock
> >> really is, and both physics and comp are not near at all to answer
> >> this. Comp has less trouble here because it does not have to reify any
> >> primary reality associated to the rock, which already emerge locally
> >> from many non material computations.
> >
> > No, as I implied above, a rock makes no difference whatsoever to the
> > measure of
> > computation it might be seen as implementing.
>
> OK.
> So, now, we have to extract "physics" from computations if we assume
> (even just standard comp). Do you agree with the UDA informal
> conclusion? That is, that physics will be given by relative (cf RSSA)
> measure on computational histories from some internal point of views?
> Such a measure has to be observer invariant (I am not talking about the
> content of what is measured, but about the general math of that
> measure). In any case we must dig on computations and provability, if
> only to get reasonable mathematical definition of those different
> "person point of view".
Yes, I agree, *given* comp.
> PS Could someone give me the plural of "point of view" ?
"points of view"
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Thu Jan 25 2007 - 07:20:35 PST