From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Oct 25 1999 - 14:01:53 MDT
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. 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.
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.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way
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