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From: ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: The Ignorant assumption
Message-ID: <388@quintus.UUCP>
Date: 13 Sep 88 07:31:06 GMT
References: <1369@garth.UUCP> <2346@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> <1383@garth.UUCP> <372@quintus.UUCP> <1390@garth.UUCP>
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In article <1390@garth.UUCP> smryan@garth.UUCP (Steven Ryan) writes:
>>>Science is philosophy on how the universe can be understood. If some aspect
>>>if the universe cannot be understood in this way, then science is incomplete.

[in a message with reference deleted, I wrote]
>>This seems to be saying that "science" _ought_ to be able to explain
>>everything.  If this is so, then I think we just have to put up with
>>science being "incomplete".

>Shades of Goedel.

Hardly "shades"; my allusion [not quoted] was pretty explicit.

>If the universe is one big Turing Machine, unprovable/undecidable things
>do not exist in reality. Since science only deals with realities (are thoughts
>real?), it would be complete and still not have to explain transcendental
>phenomon.

But is there any reason to suppose that the universe _is_ a Turing machine?
(*please* make it a neural net, they're *much* more fashionable :-)

Note that there is a big difference between
	"unprovable ``things'' do not exist in ``reality''"
and	"it is provable that unprovable things do not exist in ``reality''"
The second is a more "science-like" statement than the first; only the
second offers an explanation.

It isn't really true that science deals with ``realities''.
I strongly suggest that people who would like to know what science is
*actually* like read
	"Unfinished synthesis", Niles Eldredge, ISBN 0-19-505574-8
	"Genes, Organisms, Populations", Brandon & Burian, ISBN 0-262-52115-6
I reckon this is exciting stuff.

Ryan seems to have missed the point of my examples from physics and
biology:  there are *known* classes of events (mutations, electrons
passing through slits) where the question "why *THIS* event rather than
another in the same class" is said not to have or require any
explanation.  If this is true, the Universe cannot be a Turing machine.
If the Universe is a Turing machine, the "hidden variables" view of
Quantum Mechanics is right.