Hi Russell,
Let me try to be a little more specific. You say in your Occam paper
at
http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks/docs/occam/node4.html
"The first assumption to be made is that observers will find themselves
embedded in a temporal dimension. A Turing machine requires time to
separate the sequence of states it occupies as it performs a computation.
Universal Turing machines are models of how humans compute things, so it is
possible that all conscious observers are capable of universal computation.
Yet for our present purposes, it is not necessary to assume observers are
capable of universal computation, merely that observers are embedded in time. "
Are you meaning physical time, psychological time, or just a (linear)
order? I am just
trying to have a better understanding.
Bruno
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.)
>
>I also suspect that it is not necessary for the evolution of SASes,
>but this is obvious a debatable point.
Received on Tue Feb 24 2004 - 08:13:30 PST