Hi David, how goes?
what I was wondering was if 'noncomputable' maps onto 'nonsharable' and so
not socially relevant - bat that may be going a bit far....
On memes, there seem to me to be two levels. At the anecdotal level they are
attractive - I keep coming across examples of apparent cultural transmission
that look like the result of somthing memelike. At a mechanism level they
seem poorly thought out from what I have read. I really prefer Hillier's
notions of description retrieval - but then perhaps I would :-)
Alan
>
> This probably gets us into Penrose's Emperor's New Mind territory which
> seems to have had mixed reviews...
>
> Of course there are many more non-computable problems than
> computable ones,
> so I would just assume that there must be aspects of culture that 'do not
> compute'. Maybe this is too loose an argument though -- it's
> certainly not
> a proof!
>
> No comments on my misgivings about memes? Anybody have an opinion on
> that? Or does anyone know of a literature discussing memes?
>
> David
>
>
>
> At 09:27 PM 4/1/2003 +0100, Alan Penn wrote:
> >This brings a question to mind: are there any qualitative properties of
> >systems that are provably _not_ representable in terms of bits?
> >
> >The theory of computation says that anything computable can be computed
> >using a finite state machine (if I understand it right) so I suppose such
> >properties - if they exist - must not be computable. If so what are they,
> >and are they socially interesting?
> >
> >Alan
> >
> > >
> > > Hi SIMSOC,
> > >
> > > Jorge, I'd love to underline what you've written.
> > > Let me add just one more perspective:
> > >
> > > On Tue, 1 Apr 2003, Jorge Sima~o wrote:
> > >
> > > > Clearly, only for a very simple real world phenomena can the bit
> > > > flipping be considered an appropriate model, in the sense of
> > > > producing at least some qualitative similarities with the real
> > > > phenomena.
> > >
> > > True. Moreover, in theory, every computer model is in fact only bit-
> > > flipping. No matter how big your numbers are they are represented by
> > > bits. Any increase or decrease is a bit-flipping, and can be broken
> > > down to single-bit-flipping like in a sugarscape world.
> > >
> > > So, if you look at it the other way 'round: If you do not feel
> > > comfortable with values represented by single bits just make your
> > > sugarscape bigger and look at it from a macroscopic point of view
> > > where you can not distinguish single bits. Or, if you like it
> > > more sophisticated: Find an interpretation that translates a certain
> > > number of bits to whatever quality you like.
> > >
> > > HTH,
> > >
> > > --
> > > -- Andreas
> > >
>
> --------------------------------------
> Penn State Geography - GeoVISTA Center
> University Park, PA 16802, USA
>
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