[p2p-research] is the mind a computer

[J. Andrew Rogers]

On Sun, Nov 8, 2009 at 3:40 PM, Tere Vadén <tere.vaden at uta.fi> wrote:
>>
>> I have no idea what your definition of machine is, but I'm using the
>> technically rigorous version. Everything we can conceive of is
>> literally a machine.  I suspect it would be a waste of time even
>> providing the references (if you cared, you could have done two
>> minutes of googling to invalidate your assertion).
>
> Would that include conceived things that implement non-Turing-computable
> functions?


Yes, though strict hyper-computation is not possible in our universe,
limiting us to the more conventional kind for practical purposes.

There is some very interesting research (sorry, no links) that
suggests that it is possible to approximate hyper-computation on a
conventional computer with an error bound that asymptotically
approaches zero. For many potential applications of hyper-computation,
this would be perfectly adequate. The catch is that the conventional
computational models you would want to use as your basis have not been
studied much, so there is a lot of work to do for it to even be
practical.

This particular topic, approximated hyper-computation, is very high on
my list of things to work on if I ever find the time.


-- 
J. Andrew Rogers
realityminer.blogspot.com