On Nov 22, 2008, at 1:10 PM, Brent Meeker wrote:
> So why should it make a difference
> whether those state changes are decided by gates in the cpu or a
> huge look-up table?
The difference is in the number of times that the relevant computation
was physically implemented. When you query the lookup table to get a
bit, you are not performing the computation again. You're just viewing
the result of the computation you did earlier. It seems to me that
this matters for Duplicationists, but maybe not for Unificationists.
Or maybe I'm still misdiagnosing the problem. Is anyone arguing that,
when you play back the lookup table like a movie, this counts as
performing all of the Conway's Life computations a second time? In
that case there would be nothing problematic about this thought
experiment for Duplicationists or Unificationists. But I don't see how
playing back the lookup table can count as implementing the Conway's
Life computations.
-- Kory
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Received on Sun Nov 23 2008 - 10:06:58 PST