The Bekenstein Bound puts an upper limit on the amount of different states a quantum system can be in. Given that, every finite system is, literally, a finite-state machine.
In the case of an average human being, any computer capable of processing data on the order of 2.5072178×10^38 megabytes could therefore *perfectly* emulate that person, unless:
1) The Bekenstein Bound doesn't hold. The Bekenstein Bound is equivalent to a restatement of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, one of the cornerstones of modern physics. Or:
2) The Church-Turing thesis is false. This is the cornerstone of modern computer science.
These two, the Uncertainty Principle and the Church-Turing thesis, are two of the most tested, most reliable scientific findings of the last century.
If the world was classical, not quantum, then because classical physics deals in continua it would be theoretically possible to have a non-computable physical system. But at a fine enough granularity quantum physics seems to hold.
So I'm pretty certain that all physical processes are computable, because the opposite would require me to have a better explanation than the best current knowledge in two different sciences...
Yep, it seems plausible to me that all physical processes can be described by computation. What I'm not so sure of is whether they're reducible to that computation.
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andrewducker) wrote2010-07-23 03:43 pm
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In the case of an average human being, any computer capable of processing data on the order of 2.5072178×10^38 megabytes could therefore *perfectly* emulate that person, unless:
1) The Bekenstein Bound doesn't hold. The Bekenstein Bound is equivalent to a restatement of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, one of the cornerstones of modern physics. Or:
2) The Church-Turing thesis is false. This is the cornerstone of modern computer science.
These two, the Uncertainty Principle and the Church-Turing thesis, are two of the most tested, most reliable scientific findings of the last century.
If the world was classical, not quantum, then because classical physics deals in continua it would be theoretically possible to have a non-computable physical system. But at a fine enough granularity quantum physics seems to hold.
So I'm pretty certain that all physical processes are computable, because the opposite would require me to have a better explanation than the best current knowledge in two different sciences...
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