Re: Guessing?

On Jul 15, 12:54 am, Marshall <marshall.spi..._at_gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jul 13, 7:28 pm, David BL <davi..._at_iinet.net.au> wrote:
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> > On Jul 13, 2:54 am, Marshall <marshall.spi..._at_gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > Various claims are sometimes made about possibilities
> > > in physics that might account for some special mechanism
> > > the brain has access to. Usually these are some kind
> > > of quantum effects. My understanding is that the idea
> > > that the brain takes advantage of quantum effects is
> > > not generally accepted, but even if it were true,
> > > that doesn't change the situation. Quantum effects
> > > are computable. Quantum computers cannot compute
> > > anything that regular computers can't. Even if some
> > > hitherto-undescribed quantum effect exists, it will be
> > > possible to build an abstraction for it. I would be
> > > astonished to find that our computational models
> > > aren't already up to the task, but even if they aren't,
> > > we can simply expand them.
>
> > We don’t have a TOE and we don’t know whether
> > the universe is computable.
>
> "Computability" is a term used to classify functions,
> not something that describes physical objects. So I
> don't know what it means to ask whether the universe
> is computable.

Physicists have a tendency to think of physical objects as functions. Eg field theories, or a wave function that evolves according to the Time Dependent Schrodinger Equation. Received on Tue Jul 15 2008 - 05:03:59 CEST