I've been feeling burned on Overcoming Bias lately, meaning that I take too long to write my posts, which decreases the amount of recovery time, making me feel more burned, etc.
So I'm taking at most a one-week break. I'll post small units of rationality quotes each day, so as to not quite abandon you. I may even post some actual writing, if I feel spontaneous, but definitely not for the next two days; I have to enforce this break upon myself.
When I get back, my schedule calls for me to finish up the Anthropomorphism sequence, and then talk about Marcus Hutter's AIXI, which I think is the last brain-malfunction-causing subject I need to discuss. My posts should then hopefully go back to being shorter and easier.
Hey, at least I got through over a solid year of posts without taking a vacation.
Toby:
Yes, in some sense the idea of Turing computation is a kind of physical principle in that no well defined process we know of is not Turing computable (for other readers: this includes chaotic systems and quantum systems as the wave function is computable... with great difficulty in some cases).
Actually, if you built P and it really was very trivial, then I could get my simple Turing machine to compute a quantum level simulation of your P implementation with far less than 3^^^3 bits of extra information. Thus, if your bound really only kicks in at 3^^^3 bits, then (within currently accepted quantum physics) no trivial physical implementation of P can be possible.
Anyway, as you can't specify P in just a few simple states and symbols, I do not consider it to be an acceptable reference machine (for strict theory purposes at least).