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jacob_cannell comments on The conscious tape - Less Wrong
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The universe can be represented as computation, but it appears that requires a time element. You can not define a turing machine based on just a tape - it intrinsically requires a time dynamic in the form of the moving head.
So in digital physics and computationalism, time is fundemental - it really exists and can not be abstracted away. At the most core the universe is something that changes. Described as a turing machine it consists of information (the tape) and time - the mover.
That sound right - but that leads to Option 2.
Yes your option 2 sounds almost right, but see my amendments/disagreements.
A TM has an infinite working tape, but the problem of human-like consciousness has only finite input and output sizes. Therefore, you could define an (infinite) function by simply listing all possible pairs of (finite) inputs and outputs. This is a completely static, time-less representation that is still powerful enough to compute anything with bounded inputs and outputs.
Of course you can collapse any function into a static precomputation, but that is still itself a function, and it still requires at least one step, and it still requires the turing machine head, so you have not removed time.
I'm aware of no time-less representation of a turing machine, it seems impossible in principle.
Furthermore, for the system to exist in the real world, it will have to produce outputs for particular inputs at particular times - the time requirement is also imposed by the fact of time in our universe.
What you say is true. I find myself unsure how it applies to the original subject. Possibly my comment wasn't on topic... So feel free to ignore it.