Re: Turing Machines Have no Real Time Clock (Was The Game of Life)

From: Brent Meeker <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Sun, 21 May 2000 14:19:56 -0700

On 21-May-00, Fred Chen wrote:
> GSLevy.domain.name.hidden wrote:
>
>> Turing Machines have no real time clock and no interrupt. If we assume the
>> comp hypothesis (purely based on Turing machines) and the anthropic
>> principle, then the flow of consciousness can only be constrained by the
>> logical nature of the links pernitting transitions from one observer moment
>> to the next. Time therefore is an illusion derived from such a logical flow.
>
> It is interesting that we observe macroscopic systems tending to greater
> disorder (Second Law of Thermodynamics) which follow a flow of time parallel
> with the flow of our experienced consciousness (or observer-moments or
> whatever). If this is not parallel with the flow of the underlying
> computation (Turing machine or other form), would not the computation 'time'
> be the fundamental, 'objective' time?

Talk about Turing machines may appeal to computer science majors, but in some
cases it just makes the point harder to see. Forget Turing machines and just
consider any computer (even an analog one) running a simulation of several
different processes, e.g. a physical system and a simulated human controller.
The computers clock time need not have any simple relation to the simulated
time in the physical system or the human except that they all three create the
same order. On the other hand, the simulation must properly account for the
coordination of the simulated human controller and the simulated physical
system. Which of the three 'times' is 'real'. I'd say it's the two that have
to be coordinated.

Brent Meeker
Received on Sun May 21 2000 - 15:25:47 PDT