Comments | gustavolacerda: The Myth of Hypercomputation

gustavolacerda

The Myth of Hypercomputation

Dec 05, 2005 15:44

[FOM] The Myth of Hypercomputation
One argument against hypercomputation ( Read more... )

Comments 9

jcreed December 5 2005, 13:41:31 UTC

A friend of mine (lincoln3) went to RPI for his undergraduate degree and had classes from Bringsjord, so I heard a lot about his arguments --- I never found them very appealing, but I never was fair enough to give them a direct listen. Thanks for the link!

gustavolacerda December 5 2005, 18:06:43 UTC

Did you forget? You've found a fatal fallacy by Bringsjord, where he claims to be using the Barcan formula.

jcreed December 5 2005, 20:25:12 UTC

Oh, did we already have a discussion about him? I did forget.

gustavolacerda December 5 2005, 22:16:55 UTC

http://www.livejournal.com/users/gustavolacerda/179597.html

jcreed December 5 2005, 13:48:53 UTC

I think the important objection to the Zenil and Hernández-Quiroz link is the one they bury on point 3 of page 19: if there is any noise in the system, then all this talk of encoding oracle tapes in real numbers is absurd. For to be able to make use of that encoding, you really need a real number stored in the brain out to truly infinite precision. Otherwise you have a finite "oracle tape", and that's only as good as plain old Turing machines.

Even as much as the uncertainty principle is abused, I think it takes effect at some point here to limit usable information in the brain to a finite quantity, at least if you want to allow me to demand confinement of the position of particles in the brain to be, well, within the skull that brain is in :)

gustavolacerda March 8 2008, 00:14:57 UTC

Zenil is now occupying my old room on Forbes!

jcreed March 8 2008, 01:44:38 UTC

crazy! I'm also impressed you found such an old entry enough to report on such a thing.

gustavolacerda March 8 2008, 06:04:07 UTC

I found this by accident while searching for entries on "Bringsjord". Last Tuesday, TJ told me about their new "amazing" housemate, so I just recognized his name now as if I'd never seen it in this context before.

Here's his site. We should say hi to him.

bram December 6 2005, 02:51:17 UTC

I'm really not disturbed at all by the possibility of hypercomputation. Just think the universe would be simpler if it didn't occur.

Really, the "not finitely verifiable" argument is like saying computation of an algorithm that takes a gigabyte is impossible because it can't be verified on a 640 K computer.