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0 pointsgowld6y ago0 comments

That article isn't particularly relevant. It argues that reality is not fundamentally digital.

The article seems to argue that since a digital system can simulate an analog system (through a DAC), reality cannot be either digital nor analog. But that doesn't matter, since as long a reality can simulate digital or analog phenomena, it can simulate the digital phenomena and create Turing machines.

The link to "A Defence of Informational Structural Realism" is broken.

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bordercases6y ago· 2 in thread

I interpreted the OP as implying a strong relationship between the laws of physics and computation. It's trivial to assert that there is a relationship between the laws and physics and computation because there are computers.

But saying that the laws of physics specifically lend themselves to computers involves finding reasons that this may be so.

Yet if there is no inherent computational property in physical nature (like say that the laws actually reflect cellular automata, or are fully deterministic and are not nominal), then we ought to be skeptical that Turing Machines are somehow essential to physics or physical constraints, or that we should be surprised if Turing Machines are common.

Maybe Turing Machines are common just because the definition of a Turing Machine is syntactically weak.

unkulunkulu6y ago

Do you think the same (i.e. syntactical weakness) about evolution? Otherwise you must admit Turing Machines could be just fit?

bordercases6y ago

I'm not sure what you mean by your second question, but even though the set of postulates required for natural selection is compact, each concept that supports it is quite rich.

More general statements about evolution (the kind that I'm guessing Universal Darwinists endorse) would be uninteresting to me because they begin to eliminate details about the system which would render the claims less trivial to talk about... although, I know that there are serious theorists of self-organization that might be better equipped to understand how to talk about fundamental truths of this kind (like Stuart Kauffman).

I'd be less combative in this thread if there were discussions about the ways in which Turing-Completeness come about in the different realizations of the machine, or if comparisons were made between these machines. But so far there hasn't been a lot to prove.

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