Derek Elkins
I don't understand your point. We know what swimming is: floating and moving autonomously.
You're the first one I've heard who would use the term 'swimming' for ships. (And to be pedantic, wouldn't you say that fish swim, except when they float?) The point - stolen from Dennet, I think -- is that it is not terribly relevant wheter machines can think or just, you know, float and move autonomously, forever voyaging through dark seas...
For goodness sake, I have *REALLY* the impression that those guys who speak about computability of the Universe,
Who is speaking about computability of the universe? This looks like a straw man to me.
have the mentality of 18 century thinkers for whom the world was simple and mechanistic. Or even the mentality of people contemporary of Democritus, for whom everything "reduced" to some dance of atoms.
Or a wave function for the Universe...
So - your counterclaim is that something complex and mystic and incomprehensible cannot arise from the simple, tangible and understood? Perhaps my views are *so* 1980s, but not 18th century, I think. Why is it that we cannot design roads so that we avoid traffic jams? Don't we understand cars and asphalt? Quantum effects in the combustion engine, perhaps? More seriously, perhaps "quantum" enters into the equation in how the brain works, perhaps it is even necessary for "thought". However, I get worried it's just another mystical mantra, a gratuitous factor that, lacking any theory about how and what it does, adds nothing to help understanding the issue. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants