Re: [-empyre-] the heart of the matter

["ruben coen cagli" <ruben.coencagli@na.infn.it>]

hi nancy and everybody,
ok, abstraction is useful for discussion and conceptual comprehension..
nonetheless, information IS physical..

to be precise, this means that it IS subject to the rules of physics..if
it wouldn't, you could transmit it faster than light; quantum
teleportation shows that this is not the case..

on a historical perspective, the fact that information, and processing,
are physical, can be understood as the reason for Turing model of
computation to be 'the most satisfactory' (in the words of Goedel, 1951) with
respect to Kleene's, lambda calculus, etc..

furthermore, the fact that information is physical, led to define
quantum computing, which is a whole  interesting  field in the field of
computation and information theory..the british physicist Deutsch, based
on these ideas, was even able to strenghten the Turing-Church thesis,
that he extended to the Strong Turing-Church Principle: 'Every finite
realizable system can be perfectly simulated by a universal model
computing machine operating by finite means.'(Deutsch,1985)..

I am not an expert in cognitive sciences, but I think that these reflections
could be useful also in that field..I'll follow the discussions with great
interest..


ruben

>The concepts 'red?, the
> ?sound of a bell? are abstractions - essentially information. They are
> not tied to exact neurons, just as a variable in a program need not be
> tied to a particular physical memory location (virtual addressing,
> virtual memory, cache, CPU registers etc).
> Information exists, but has
> no physical presence in itself. Information can only exist in a
> practical sense, however, if there is (at least) one representation of
> it in (at least) one medium physically. But that representation does
> not need any independent labelling with meaning - it can simply be an
> abstract symbol, whose meaning is entirely defined by its functional
> consequences. Bill and jackbackrack will have a different perspective,
> perhaps, coming from the fields of AI and robotics; what do you think?
> Nancy


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