On Thu, Nov 03, 2005 at 12:39:27PM -0800, "Hal Finney" wrote:
> Russell Standish writes:
> > Lack of convincing is perhaps due to lack of understanding. Even I do
> > not fully understand the true worth of my "derivation". It seems to me
> > that I show that any physical theory that takes into account
> > observation must have that Hilbert space structure, with that form of
> > the Born rule. Yet there may well be special conditions that nobody
> > has yet spotted that limit the claims. OTH, it cannot produce
> > something like the classic Schroedinger equation for the hydrogen
> > atom, which as we know must be strictly false as it ignores
> > relativistic effects.
>
> What about other universes, such as Conway's Life universe? It has
> nothing like QM. Does your argument predict that life is impossible
> in Life? We know that it is possible to create computers there - I
> think self-replicating machines as well. Can we really argue from such
> general premises that there is no way that living organisms could exist
> in that universe?
>
> I am skeptical that we can reach such strong and specific conclusions
> from such broad and general assumptions.
>
> Hal Finney
It predicts that either a) there is no conscious life in a GoL
universe (thus contradicting computationalism) or b) the physics as
seen by conscious GoL observers will be quantum mechanical in nature.
If one could establish that a given GoL structure is conscious, and
then if one could demonstrate that its world view is incompatible with
QM then we might have a contradiction.
Even then, there is still a loophole. I suspect that 3D environment
are far more likely to evolve the complex structures needed for
consciousness, so that conscious GoL observers are indeed a rare
thing. I don't know if this is the case or not, but if true it would
make a GoL example irrelevant. More interesting is to look at some 3D
CA rules that appear to support universal computation - Andy Wuensche
had a paper on this in last year's ALife in Boston. No arXiv ref I'm
afraid, but you could perhaps email him for an eprint...
Cheers
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Received on Thu Nov 03 2005 - 17:55:38 PST