Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by curiousest 19 days ago
You can say things like, “In the domain of physics, X,” “Assuming the scientific method, X,” or “Assuming the premises of logic, X.”

But “computation is a fundamental aspect of the universe”, in the way it's being understood in this thread (as opposed to the article) does not remain within any of those frameworks. It makes a claim about reality as a whole.

Once you make that kind of universal claim, all the assumptions built into “computation” - about identity, distinct states, lawful transitions, causation, logic, etc. - become part of the claim. You cannot use those assumptions silently and then present the conclusion as framework-independent.

And those frameworks come with consequences. Using the language of computation, they come with "lossiness" wrt modelling "reality".

(see Aristotle Metaphysics -> Kant CoPR -> later Wittgenstein)

2 comments

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the Laws of Thermodynamics are pretty d*mn fundamental.
The Church-Turing thesis (the fact that all models of computation we've been able to come up with are equivalent) gives the necessary weight to that claim.
The Church-Turing thesis is a statement about symoblic processes, and symbolism is simply not fundamental to the universe. It is fundamental to how humans understand the universe. That's the distinction.