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eli_gottlieb

The universe already contains human-level intelligent agents. They're called humans.

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But humans aren't necessarily Turing machines.

If we're all in a Turing machine, Q.E.D.

It's still possible, technically, that humans are very high level simulations computed by a Turing machine.

How so?, if a human isn't a Turing machine the you can learn him the rules and give him the instruction tape and he will perform the same as Tm.

Humans can certainly replicate TMs. It's uncertain whether a TM can replicate a human. If the Universe is a simulation running on a TM, then humans are replicable and therefore Hard AI is possible on a Von Neumann architecture, which would be an exciting discovery.

From the perspective of computing things, humans are Turing Machines, because a Turing Machine can compute anything that is computable.

That's like saying from the perspective of arithmetic we're abaci because we can both do sums. Again, whether or not human beings can model a TM is a boring and silly question. The interesting question, and one that remains not just unsolved but stubbornly resistant to progress towards a solution, is whether a TM can model a human. It's far from certain that conscious is computable, and it's getting further with each plate of spaghetti we throw at the teflon wall that is Hard AI.

Is physics a turing machine too? It bends, moves, burns,freezes etc. things according to it's instruction tape (laws)?

I would say laws( the ones we usually define in physics ) are consequence of physics and don't really exist.

So, do you say that physical laws in this space, may not hold in another space? That there is one or more variables, which control at which set-point our physical laws (the instruction tape) are begining and ending?

The physical laws here, like gravity or electromagnetism, may not make any sense in other potential universes or even other parts of this universe.

For example, the current model of the beginning of the universe, most of the rules of physics go out the window as everything we know as laws when evaluated end up with division by zero. It's infinite in size and infinite in density, something that we've got no way of understanding mathematically.

tbh. that doesn't satisfy me, because infinity isn't something that we cannot understand. Actually infinity is much easier to understand than the big bang theory. When there is one thing that nature has thought us from day 1 to now, it is that everything in nature is highly efficient. I feel the need to repeat that "Nature is highly efficient, in every aspect!" So imagining that a maximum entropy universe will result in the quasi violation of the first law of thermodynamics is ridicule. See: [1] Energy will not cease to exist, yes, but I also think that the transformations of excited energy states won't stop.

As an example: "Where does the fire go, after you blow it out? The question is irritating, because fire is a side-effect of quantum interactions, while the wind that blew it off, absorbs and vaporizes this energy into measurable quanta and is comparable to what black holes do.

The rate at which vapors of flames excess from this reaction, is dependant of composition of the matter and it's catalyzation rate. The flame contains many atoms with electrons in highly excited states and keeps decaying into lower energy levels, causing the excess energy to swing in the frequencies/wavelengths or just colors/spectra of the burning material. You can learn more about that in [2].

Why this seemingly unrelated example of "fire and flames" is simply explained as an „autocatalytic set“ [3].

Adding that matter is both particle AND wave dependant on the observation is very simple to understand, when you know that we live in a two dimensional space and that energy outside of our space exists as a wave function.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip

[2] http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/qua...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autocatalytic_set

The question, then, is: what the bloody hell are we?

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