Here’s something I don’t get about Wolfram and insisting on a computation-like underbelly of the universe.
Computation is built on the idea of Turing machine. But what is reading the tape in Turing’s analogy? A human! The tape and Turing machine are designed so that every humanagrees upon its formal validity.
It’s not a statement about mental states or computation based “reality”. More than all of those and first, it is a about how society can use social rule-following and basic step-by-step processes (using language) to create formal systems.
A human reading the tape or even a human with pencil and paper. That is the main analogy.
So why do so many like Wolfram think computation is reality? It seems from the get go he is headed down the wrong track.
You and I are computers and computers can think according to Turing. But TM’s came about to develop formal systems.
To me Wolfram and the Churchlands seem to have completely unjustified claims.
Computation is not built on the idea of the Turing machine... That is a very, very strong claim that I assume you did not mean to imbue with such heft.
The Turing machine, rather, is a Platonic ideal -- a model -- of a computing machine which is transparent to humans performing analysis on it. There are other models, and there are other means of computation.
I think you missed the forest for the trees. It may help to familiarize yourself with turing completeness and what wolfram calls computational equivalence.
We could be a little more permissive here about what constitutes a "model".
Models are not systems. <=> Maps are not territories.
Formal systems are models. They model the world. Depending on which formal system you use, one may model the world better than another. There is no "perfect" there is only "comprehensible", "insightful", and, when predicting the future, "accurate". All of these are measured in degrees, not kinds.
Models are not related to systems a priori. You are permitted to apply any model to any system. Whether the application is useful is only posterior to this first step.
To me this a problematic viewpoint. All these formalisms are not meant to be models of the world. I’d even argue for anything to be accepted as a formal system it must be far removed from taking stances on reality.
Computation is built on the idea of Turing machine. But what is reading the tape in Turing’s analogy? A human! The tape and Turing machine are designed so that every human agrees upon its formal validity.
It’s not a statement about mental states or computation based “reality”. More than all of those and first, it is a about how society can use social rule-following and basic step-by-step processes (using language) to create formal systems.
A human reading the tape or even a human with pencil and paper. That is the main analogy.
So why do so many like Wolfram think computation is reality? It seems from the get go he is headed down the wrong track.
You and I are computers and computers can think according to Turing. But TM’s came about to develop formal systems.
To me Wolfram and the Churchlands seem to have completely unjustified claims.