[Noisebridge-discuss] Philosophy and Computer Language Question

[Meredith L. Patterson]

Bear in mind that the "Whitehead" being mentioned is Alfred North Whitehead, coauthor of the _Principia Mathematica_ with Bertrand Russell. Both were mathematicians whose work overlapped significantly with philosophy.

--mlp

On Fri, Dec 30, 2011 at 02:13:22PM -0800, Ryan Rawson wrote:
> See the problem with this 'process philosophy' is it sounds like a
> MODEL of the real world to me, rather than "how it works".  Without an
> evidential backing, how can this process philosophy be anything other
> than wishful thinking?
> 
> As for the computer science side of things, ultimately when you get
> down to it, everything is bits and bytes and CPU instructions. So we
> can talk in terms of floating point precisions, ranges of integers,
> memory sizes, cpu speed, etc.
> 
> And on a more 'out there' moment, it would require a computer with as
> much computing power that is implied by the universe itself to
> simulate the universe. That is we can consider the universe as a
> real-time computing platform that is simulating itself, and all the
> computations that would be required to make it happen would also have
> to be replicated. Eg: all the quantum interactions and other processes
> that build up and cause reality.  Futhermore, we cant simulate reality
> because we dont know how it fully works yet.  So whatever we build as
> a simulation is merely a model of reality, and thus will always
> diverge from it in eventually (presumably?) important ways.
> 
> On Fri, Dec 30, 2011 at 1:08 PM, Caleb Grayson <calebgrayson at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Well.. I'm not sure. I'm more of a philosopher than a computer scientist.
> >
> > In Whitehead's Process Philosophy he said everything in reality is a
> > function or process that takes in the entire universe at every moment and
> > spits out Actual Occasions that become apart of the Creative Advance, the
> > history of functional  results in time and space.
> >
> > There is a question as to what time an space are. It is m suspicion that
> > functions and their solutions are not in time and space, but time and space
> > are  in functions and their solutions. Why would times and spaces for which
> > nothing is happening be generated by an efficient system?
> > CS, if I understand correctly, time and space have to be predefined by
> > establishing their numerical domains first.
> > I'm hoping CS in its attempt to simulate reality can give inside into it.
> >
> > Of course CS being a rational/material system has no place to calculate for
> > spirit/soul outside of its system which Whitehead does allow for.
> >
> > On Dec 30, 2011, at 12:34 PM, Will Sargent <will.sargent at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> my particular interest is how simulations handle events in time and space.
> >>  how does a simulation taken multiple input from multiple functions or users
> >> and align them in time•space.  what would those functions look like?
> >
> >
> > Are you talking about multi-agent systems?
> >
> > Will.
> >
> >
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