Related papers: Can we debug the Universe?
Hypercomputation is a relatively new branch of computer science that emerged from the idea that the Church--Turing Thesis, which is supposed to describe what is computable and what is noncomputable, cannot possible be true. Because of its…
We clarify the confusion, misunderstanding and misconception that the physical finiteness of the universe, if the universe is indeed finite, would rule out all hypercomputation, the kind of computation that exceeds the Turing computability,…
Due to common misconceptions about the Church-Turing thesis, it has been widely assumed that the Turing machine provides an upper bound on what is computable. This is not so. The new field of hypercomputation studies models of computation…
Can a Turing Machine simulate the human mind? If the Church-Turing thesis is assumed to be true, then a Turing Machine should be able to simulate the human mind. In this paper, I challenge that assumption by providing strong mathematical…
According to the Church-Turing Thesis (CTT), effective formal behaviours can be simulated by Turing machines; this has naturally led to speculation that physical systems can also be simulated computationally. But is this wider claim true,…
The simulation hypothesis has recently excited renewed interest in the physics and philosophy communities. However, the hypothesis specifically concerns {\textit{computers}} that simulate physical universes. So to formally investigate the…
The theory that all processes in the universe are computational is attractive in its promise to provide an understandable theory of everything. I want to suggest here that this pancomputationalism is not sufficiently clear on which problem…
At a first glance the Theory of computation relies on potential infinity and an organization aimed at solving a problem. Under such aspect it is like Mendeleev theory of chemistry. Also its theoretical development reiterates that of this…
The Church-Turing Thesis confuses numerical computations with symbolic computations. In particular, any model of computability in which equality is not definable, such as the lambda-models underpinning higher-order programming languages, is…
The physical Church thesis is a thesis about nature that expresses that all that can be computed by a physical system-a machine-is computable in the sense of computability theory. At a first look, this thesis seems contradictory with the…
The Church-Turing thesis asserts that if a partial strings-to-strings function is effectively computable then it is computable by a Turing machine. In the 1930s, when Church and Turing worked on their versions of the thesis, there was a…
It is possible in principle to construct quantum mechanical observables and unitary operators which, if implemented in physical systems as measurements and dynamical evolution, would contradict the Church-Turing thesis, which lies at the…
Beginning with Turing's seminal work in 1950, artificial intelligence proposes that consciousness can be simulated by a Turing machine. This implies a potential theory of everything where the universe is a simulation on a computer, which…
Hypercomputation or super-Turing computation is a ``computation'' that transcends the limit imposed by Turing's model of computability. The field still faces some basic questions, technical (can we mathematically and/or physically build a…
Notoriously, quantum computation shatters complexity theory, but is innocuous to computability theory. Yet several works have shown how quantum theory as it stands could breach the physical Church-Turing thesis. We draw a clear line as to…
Physical processes are computations only when we use them to externalize thought. Computation is the performance of one or more fixed processes within a contingent environment. We reformulate the Church-Turing thesis so that it applies to…
With the great success in simulating many intelligent behaviors using computing devices, there has been an ongoing debate whether all conscious activities are computational processes. In this paper, the answer to this question is shown to…
We prove the Extended Church-Turing Thesis: Every effective algorithm can be efficiently simulated by a Turing machine. This is accomplished by emulating an effective algorithm via an abstract state machine, and simulating such an abstract…
This paper investigates the view that digital hypercomputing is a good reason for rejection or re-interpretation of the Church-Turing thesis. After suggestion that such re-interpretation is historically problematic and often involves attack…
Is the universe computable? If so, it may be much cheaper in terms of information requirements to compute all computable universes instead of just ours. I apply basic concepts of Kolmogorov complexity theory to the set of possible…