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From: obnoxio@BRAHMS.BERKELEY.EDU.UUCP
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Complexity and Philosophy
Message-ID: <8705291501.AA12310@brahms.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Fri, 29-May-87 11:01:58 EDT
Article-I.D.: brahms.8705291501.AA12310
Posted: Fri May 29 11:01:58 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 30-May-87 11:27:11 EDT
References: <19071@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: obnoxio@brahms.berkeley.edu (Obnoxious Math Grad Student)
Distribution: world
Organization: Brahms Gang Posting Central
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Summary: Tom's razor

In article <19071@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>, tedrick@ernie (Tom Tedrick) writes:
>I believe the philosophical consequences of complexity theory are
>enormous and that the field is wide open for someone with the
>ambition to pursue it.

Any suggestions?

All I can think of is some strictly AI "anthropic principle" constraints
on how mind "works".  Thus, our mind presumably follows some polynomial
time algorithm when doing various tasks.  If the ideal version of these
tasks involves an NP-hard problem, then we would expect any P-based model
to inevitably err, much as in real life.  (Assuming P!=NP, of course.)

Now, beyond this--I'm stymied.  An example: even though physics might be
boiled down to automata theory some day, I fail to see how "time" would
mean anything to such low-level calculations.  If wave-function collapse
or what have you is an exponentially hard, or even non-recursive computa-
tion--that seems perfectly reasonable to me.  We need never notice, be-
cause of renormalization.

Or are you proposing a computational complexity implementation of Occam's
razor?

ucbvax!brahms!weemba	Matthew P Wiener/Brahms Gang/Berkeley CA 94720