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Showing posts from July, 2012

Turtles all the way side ways...Godel and Turing point the way.

In a response to a friend on Facebook an interesting discussion on recent results that decidability of paths for particle transmission at the quantum scale is not assured similar to Turing's halting result in computer science and Godel's incompleteness in logic. This article was the original source of the discussion. Below I respond to comments made by my friend. "Making harder the conundrum is that Godel's Incompleteness and Turing's halting only apply to countable sets, not continua." -- Precisely, but the riddle being that an infinitely countable set is included in that definition...and it's possible to have infinite subsets of such sets! So discretization (of anything) seems to be fundamental to continuity...this truth of mathematics which stands apart from our present understanding of reality may point us in the direction of what reality really is about. If the pattern continues to apply it may provide a way to test validity of multiverse theories.

Objections to a non physical conclusion for consciousness.

In a paper recently published by Mark Muhlestein in the journal Cognitive Computation the following conclusion is made: " In this computational framework, the distinction between a computation and the recording of a computation can be blurred arbitrarily, yet the physical implementation of the computation itself is unchanged. From this, we conclude that a purely computational account of consciousness is unsatisfactory." This conclusion I agree with but for a few reasons not directly addressed in the paper which I elaborate on below. On the objections, I'd say the ones that are most against this conclusion (that either computation is not all there is or consciousness is not what we think it is, roughly) are objections 3 and 4. The clarion call that was ringing in my head as I read was the condition that a random number generator was being used. Conscious states are intimately dynamic systems that do not have deterministic response as asserted in the thought expe