X-Message-Number: 23952 Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2004 10:10:08 -0400 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: CryoNet #23943 - #23951 Hi everyone! Mike Perry and I have gotten into this kind of discussion before. I am not abandoning it because I think Mike has a good brain and what he says always deserves consideration, if not agreement. And so: In what sense is QM a formal system? Just as with any other phenomena in the world, we can produce a formal theory which describes how it works --- so far as our experiments with it go. However physical theories should never be confused with reality. It's not that physical theories aren't very useful; they just aren't the same. Furthermore, computers by their nature are supposed to follow Turing's Theorem. This at least looks like a much stronger requirement than following a formal system (theory?). Chess follows a formal system in that its rules can be set out and breaking them can be clearly verified. Does the game of chess then constitute a computer? Careful here: it's not enough to say that it can be played on a computer. So can celestial mechanics, on a large and parallel computer, but no one claims that celestial mechanics IS a computer. (At least no one whom I would consider sane). And since this subject began with human beings, I will discuss humans here too. Yes, human beings like everything else must follow physical law, chemical laws, biochemical laws, and all the rest. Do human brains then work like ANY kind of computer? To make a computer like a human brain you'd need one which grows new processors and new connections between both old and new processors, with that connectivity constituting its memory. Fundamentally language itself, which plays such a big role in human thinking, grew out of nonlinguistic characteristics of brains. It is languages which we use to construct formal systems, but no language yet can be simply identified with reality itself. And we, with our brains, when faced by events which don't follow our formal systems, abandon them to make other ones which fit better. It's our ability to do that which provides evidence that we aren't computers, we just use them. Best wishes and long long life, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=23952