Thanks for your reply, Bruno...
> All this for reasons similar to those made by Everett in his many
> world papers. Have you read Everett ? (or at least Tegmark? or
> Deutsch?)
Just Tegmark. I'm looking into the others...
> Is it more impressioning than the (binary) counting algorithm, which
> just counts: 0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, etc. It generates (after the
> first 1) every strings too. And you can implement it in a reversible
> way with a reversible universal turing machine.
Well, there may be some reasons to think that cellular automata are more
fundamental, computationally speaking, than even Turing Machines. For
instance, a Turing Machine has a "moving" part (the read/write head) and
usually a complicated state transition table, perhaps requiring a physics
all its own. While the cellular automaton has no moving parts at all - just
two states and the transition rule.
And consider the economy of its description. Suppose you needed to send a
computer program to an alien civilization. Describing the workings of a
Turing Machine might be a little tricky, while a few simple pictures can
convey the idea of a cellular automaton and its initial configuration.
Since CA can do everything TMs can do, and because of their simple
implementation, I tend to prefer them.
>> But the advantage here is that we can more easily envision the
>> existence of such a miraculous object like a minimal cellular
>> automaton than, say, a Universal Turing Machine. Cellular automata
>> naturally implement physical universes without any interpretation.
>
> How? Implementations are interpretations.
Yes, I suppose so. I simply mean that that the cellular automaton has a
direct mapping to 3D physical space. It's just easier for me to envision.
>> The bits merely exist... and we can see them with our digital eyes
>> - and the patterns they generate.
>
> Where?
Well I suppose I was trying to be poetic. :) The cellular automaton, I
believe, exists in "Platonic Heaven" as you described it. It really doesn't
matter.
> It is not the solution. It is the problem. Your type of approach
> like Schmidhuber's one is based on a naive association between the
> first person view and some third person description (brain, machine,
> automata). See http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m1726.html for
> an attempt to explain how non trivial the "mind body" problem becomes
> when the computationalist hypothesis is taken seriously.
Wow, that is quite some post. =) It's almost overwhelming.
Can you try to describe, in simple terms: what is the mind/body problem?
And how does it relate to cellular automata?
I always assumed that the automaton merely exists... and we (our minds and
bodies) simply emerge from the bits.
Thanks again for your thoughts,
Joel
Received on Thu Jun 14 2001 - 12:55:16 PDT