X-Message-Number: 21644 Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2003 23:52:29 -0700 From: Mike Perry <> Subject: Computing and Symbols This is a response to Thomas Donaldson, #21621. >First of all it seems to me that quantum computers would be quite >far from Turing machines. Not so far, according to David Deutsch, *Fabric of Reality*, though he does make some distinctions. But basically you have that all that is happening is a kind of computation. Personally, it isn't clear to me whether we should really expect quantum computers to compute differently from classical computers or just in some cases faster. In any case I think an argument can be made that at worst a generalization of a Turing machine which was still a discrete-state device could isomorphically simulate the universe as we know it, granted you allow enough time (maybe very considerable time). The important, underlying property in all this is that events--including brain events--happen in discrete jumps and that what happens in between is not important, at least insofar as the conscious experience of the observer is concerned. ... >Second, in what sense does discreteness >become symbolic? For me the answer might be "a mathematically valid but not very important sense, except in special cases." I don't think the general behavior of a computer is limited to the special cases. True, computers generally operate with bits, which can be thought of as 0's and 1's, which in turn are symbols, but so what? It doesn't mean we have to know the "meaning" of 0 and 1 to make sense of a computation, as I've tried to say before. Discreteness in turn should be modelable, isomorphically, in a computer. So, since a computer is at least nominally symbolic, we might say that what it models is also symbolic too, though likely it is not in any sense in which the individual "symbols" have important meanings that are hard to guess. >... >As human beings we do have a fundamental problem in NOT seeing >everything as symbolic, at least in the sense that we try to >use our language to describe it. But our language comes from >us, it does not comes from the events we see happening around >us. If you worked at it I think you could create a language which would be reasonably decipherable by an outsider who didn't know the language already. To express simple, guessable mathematical concepts and properties would be an easy starting-point. Mike Perry Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=21644