Norman K. McPhail wrote:
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> Don Mikulecky wrote:
> >
> > Don Mikulecky replies:
> >
> > Well I was trying to get him to come right out and say that he was heading
> > towards
> > the Universal Turing machine. The answer to you is yes. If You can
disretize
> > the
> > sets...go from analog to digital...there is no problem... With the Turing
> > machine we
> > get into the infinite tape problem...it is NOT realizable!
> > Don
> >
>
> Don:
>
> I want to make sure I understand what you are saying here. Is it just
> that our machine will always get bound up in the infinite tape problem.
> We would interpret this to mean that it is NOT a truly universal
> simulator or model maker?
In the abstract it is. in other words any realizable machine is a special case
of
the universal Turing machine. Turing's universal machine was never meant to be
realized, but to be the conceptual prototype for all effective processes.
Church's
thesis is based on this.
> So whether our machine is using analog or
> digital, sequential or parallels processing makes no difference. It may
> be a spectacular super computer, but it can never duplicate a thing like
> life.
Not even a complex system, let alone life!
>
>
> I've found that a good way to think about this fallacy is in terms of
> Frank Tipler's immortality machine. Recall he predicts that we will all
> live again and be immortal in some future all powerful super computer.
> See THE PHYSICS OF IMMORTALITY.
>
> In contrast, what we're saying here is that this is NOT realizable in a
> machine no matter how powerful it is. So we ought not to expect that at
> some point in the future we will all become immortal as Tipler predicts
> and live our lives forever in a machine. This is just another way of
> saying that a machine can't ever come close to mapping qualities that
> emerge from the modeling relation.
Yes, I think this kind of fantasy is out of the question in any other vein
except
science fiction. Even von Neuman went off the deep end here with his universal
constructor. He confused material cause with effective cause and extrapolated
from
Turings unrealizable machine to a hypothetical constructor which would replicate
itself. Rosen has shown that the kind of replication we see in organisms comes
about in a very non-machine like manner and that it is impossible in a machine.
>
>
> Norm
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Don Mikulecky