X-Message-Number: 21621 Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2003 08:58:07 -0400 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: CryoNet #21612 - #21615 To Mike Perry: First of all it seems to me that quantum computers would be quite far from Turing machines. So we may even have COMPUTERS which are not Turing machines. Second, in what sense does discreteness become symbolic? To be symbolic, the meaning of a symbol (which could be almost anything) is assigned by someone else, it is in no way intrinsic to the symbol. When we deal with computers WE are the ones who interpret their output. This remains so even if we try to attach special circuits to them which get them to tell us what they have found: WE MADE THOSE CIRCUITS. It is quite certainly true that we can probably find it easier to talk about discrete processes than continuous ones --- though DE's and PDE's (Differential Equations and Partial Differential Equations) make me wonder about that. But our ease in attaching symbols to a process in no sense makes it symbolic itself. As human beings we do have a fundamental problem in NOT seeing everything as symbolic, at least in the sense that we try to use our language to describe it. But our language comes from us, it does not comes from the events we see happening around us. This remains true even if we look at the very complex output of computers. AND AS FOR REPLICATION AND EXPANSION: I've already argued that we should not expect a singularity, but I will point out that the real case that such a civilization, whether or not it comes into existence suddenly or takes a million years to develop, might take over the universe is that it would continually expand. That expansion need have no relation at all to replication. If each of a finite number of beings grows larger and larger, that will be enough. And cosmically, even 1 million years is a short time. The problem of "where are they, then?" remains. Best wishes and long long life for all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=21621