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From: G.Joly@cs.ucl.ac.uk (Gordon Joly)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Searle, Strong AI, and Chinese Rooms
Message-ID: <1325@ucl-cs.uucp>
Date: 12 Dec 90 13:37:58 GMT
Sender: news@cs.ucl.ac.uk
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In article   <3634@aipna.ed.ac.uk>, cam@aipna.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm) writes

< In article <28345@mimsy.umd.edu> kohout@drinkme.cs.umd.edu (Robert Kohout) writes:
< 
< >"At the fundamental level, matter is discreet, ...
< 
< A reference to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle? Or, more generally,
< the idea that Knowing How It All Works is fundamentally beyond our
< punny minds?
< --
< Chris Malcolm    cam@uk.ac.ed.aipna   +44 31 667 1011 x2550
< Department of Artificial Intelligence, Edinburgh University
< 5 Forrest Hill, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, UK             DoD #205

It would be interesting to known if space-time is discrete or
continuous, before we start on the hard problems like matter and
energy. Stephen Hawking gave a paper, many years ago, where he
calculated the Winding number of space-time to be about unity, so
space-time had holes in it. He christened this space-time "foam". More
recently, Chris Isham has been looking at the space-time manifold and
considering "quantum topology" of the "continuum" of space-time. If
space were discrete, "in reality", then pseudo-Riemannian manifolds
would be a poor models (but differentiable). Having discrete
space-time would make numerical experiments a tad easier.

But I digress...

Gordon Joly                                       +44 71 387 7050 ext 3716
InterNet: G.Joly@cs.ucl.ac.uk          UUCP: ...!{uunet,ukc}!ucl-cs!G.Joly
Computer Science, University College London, Gower Street, LONDON WC1E 6BT