Re: Tegmark is too "physics-centric"

From: Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2004 11:05:27 +0100

At 18:00 23/02/04 +1100, Russell Standish wrote:
>Comments interspersed.
>
>On Sun, Jan 18, 2004 at 07:15:45AM -0500, Kory Heath wrote:
> >
> > I understand this perspective, but for what it's worth, I'm profoundly out
> > of sympathy with it. In my view, computation universality is the real
> key -
> > life and consciousness are going to pop up in any universe that's
> > computation universal, as long as the universe is big enough and/or it
> > lasts long enough. (And there's always enough time and space in the
> > Mathiverse!)
>
>Computational universality is not sufficient for open-ended evolution
>of life. In fact we don't what is sufficient, as evidenced by it being
>an open problem (see Bedau et al., Artificial Life 6, 363.)



How do you know then that comp universality is not sufficient?
(Giving that comp universality entails the non existence of a complete
theory of comp-universality; I mean computer science is provably
not completely unifiable; there is no general theory for non stopping
machines or non stopping comp processes).
Are you thinking about something specific which is lacking in
comp universality?


>I also suspect that it is not necessary for the evolution of SASes,
>but this is obvious a debatable point.


Are you saying that "comp" is entirely irrelevant to explain
the origin of life, the origin of the universe(s) ?

Bruno
Received on Mon Feb 23 2004 - 05:05:37 PST