Re[2]: Preventing AI Breakout [was Genetics, nannotechnology, and , programming]

Matt Gingell (mjg223@is7.nyu.edu)
Mon, 25 Oct 1999 18:12:57 -0400

> Matt Gingell wrote:

>> 
>> I think the original remark misses the depth of Church-Turing. It's
>> not just talking about what you can do with a computer, it's talking
>> about what you can do with _any conceivable_ formal system. If you can
>> find expressible regularities in the universe which can't be described
>> under the lambda calculus then you've disproven the conjecture.

>
> With all due respect, I do *not* "miss the depth" of things like
> Church-Turing-Tarski. I believe the Church-Turing-Tarski thesis is
> false and will be disproved. I believe there are expressible
> regularities in the laws of physics that cannot be described under the
> lambda calculus, by Turing machines, et cetera. Furthermore, I believe
> that *any* complete causal explanation of an event, which means the
> complete chain of causality extending back to the reason why anything
> exists in the first place, *must* contain noncomputable phenomena. I
> believe that the noncomputability of objectively real phenomena is a
> necessity, not a coincidence.

Ok - then I understand your position but none of the reasoning behind it.

> And, for the record, I believe that the Church-Turing-Tarski thesis
> is fundamentally *wrong*, not just limited in the space of phenomena
> it describes; there is *no such thing* as a simulation; it is not
> possible to "compute" the complete behavior of a quark without
> creating an actual quark.

Then you believe that a quark has properties which it is not possible to describe computationally. To some extent, I agree. A piece of paper with a mass, position, and velocity written on it is not a particle, it's still just a piece of paper. Only simulated people get wet in simulated rainstorms.

> I don't know that a genius-in-a-box that naturally evolved in a Life
> universe could deduce that it was in a simulation, but I know it could
> deduce that it wasn't looking at the lowest level of reality.

What suggests to you that no reality may ever be computable or that Turing equivalence proves the world is a simulation?

-matt