Fifty or Sixty Years of Processor Development for This?

Re:Fifty or Sixty Years of Processor Development for This? by iainmerrick on Wednesday April 04, 2018 @05:03AM (#16753157)

My claim is kind of orthogonal, that “actual instances” is a red herring and that the only thing that matters is observational equivalence.

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Re:Fifty or Sixty Years of Processor Development for This? by mjburgess on Wednesday April 04, 2018 @05:43AM (#16753296)

Yes, but you're defining "observation" as some weird intra-wood process (, intra-silicon in the case of digital machines).

Observation means, for example, reflecting some light off the thing. Does a piece of silicon become transparent if I program it to model glass? No.

So, trivially, it is observed immediately not to be equivalent.

What you mean by "observation" is: can a person using the model system inform themselves of the target.

Do I get the message "lets visible light through: 98%" from the machine when I have correctly modelled the glass.

That message isn't observation, it's calculation. Calculation is what happens when I use a tool to inform myself about something.

That the machine emits the right symbols in a way that it is programmed to, so that I acquire accurate beliefs about the world, says nothing of the machine. The machine does not become transparent.

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