On 03 Dec 2008, at 19:31, Brent Meeker wrote:
>> ... A computation is a more sophisticated object, and
>> digitalness makes all the difference. In a rock, I don't see any
>> working digitalness, nor even analogs of this digitalness.
>
> Isn't this a matter of interpretation? Even the 1s and 0s of a
> digital computer
> are not really digital - they are just approximately high or low
> voltage states
> - and even in our most fundamental theory, i.e. quantum mechanics,
> they are
> described by continuous functions on a Hilbert space. So we might
> consider the
> motion of an atom in a rock to be zero is it less than some value
> and 1 if it is
> greater.
Well, if this were true, it would just mean we have to take account of
more instantiations on computations in the universal deployment, and
so this is not relevant in the discussion. Yet I don't believe it. A
high order complex computations similar to what a human brain does, is
very demanding in robustness, large memory, subtle redundancy, etc...
Quantitatively a rock could implements some short low invertebrate
"experience" perhaps every billions years ...
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Fri Dec 05 2008 - 03:33:01 PST