Le 22-juin-06, à 03:55, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit (in a reply to
Stephen):
> I am reminded of David Chalmer's paper recently mentioned by Hal
> Finney, "Does a Rock Implement Every Finite State Automaton?", which
> looks at the idea that any physical state such as the vibration of
> atoms in a rock can be mapped onto any computation, if you look at it
> the right way. Usually when this idea is brought up (Hilary Putnam,
> John Searle, the aforementioned Chalmers paper) it is taken as
> self-evidently wrong. However, I have not seen any argument to
> convince me that this is so; it just seems people think it *ought* to
> be so, then look around for a justification having already made up
> their minds. Now, if any computation is implemented by any physical
> process, then if one physical process exists, then all possible
> computations are implemented. I'll stop at this point, although it
> is tempting to speculate that if all it takes for every computation to
> be implemented is a single physical process - a rock, a single
> subatomic particle, the idle passage of time in an otherwise empty
> universe - perhaps this is not far from saying that the physical
> process is superfluous, and all computations are implemented by virtue
> of their existence as platonic objects.
Nice point! At least those platonic computations are well-defined as
such including the counterfactuals. Now, a real rock implements
plausibly a particular (not universal) quantum computation, and as such
some finite state automaton, but not a universal computation, still
less a DU.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Thu Jun 22 2006 - 10:17:27 PDT