From: Brian Holtz [Brian.Holtz@sun.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2001 8:47 AM
To: Brian Holtz
Subject: Re: Hawking, Penrose: Our universe, highly unlikely.


"Paul Filseth" <pgxf@lsil.com> wrote

> The fact remains that you think it's acceptable
> to accuse me of dishonesty for saying something that's true, merely
> because I drew attention to facts that are important to me instead of
> ones that are important to you.

My accusation was:

> > > if your [original] claim were merely about the theoretical possibility
> > > of artificial life in a Turing machine, then it seems disingenuous
> > > to instead invoke the simplistic physics of Life

You replied that "I think it was a more direct method", and so I said:

"Since you just said that it was not the Turing machine method you were
thinking of, the "if" clause of my statement should be false, and
no charge of disingenuousness stands."

So now I'm confused. Perhaps you are retracting your apparent statement
that your original claim did not rely merely on the theoretical possibility
of artificial life in a Turing Machine.

If not, then no charge of disingenuousness stands, and I'm not sure
what we're debating.

If so, then my explanation of my suspicion remains:

"I think somebody has demonstrated that you can build a Turing machine
using the gears and whatnot of an erector set.  But would you use
an erector set as your poster child for an alternative universe
that could support evolving patterns?  If your claimed support for
evolving patterns came from the property of Turing completeness,
then I found it odd that you didn't just using abstract Turing
machines as your example, but instead chose a Turing machine substrate
that just so happens to also support a menagerie of subsystems that
people talk about in pseudobiological terms. Hence my suspicion of
disingenuousness."

Note that I never said your statement was "dishonest"; I only said
it "seems disingenuous".  Perhaps it simply didn't occur to you that
when you chose Life as your example Turing machine substrate for
Turing-computable lifelike patterns, people might think you were
making a claim about the evolvability of puffers and gliders etc.

--
brian@holtz.org
http://humanknowledge.net