From: Christian Szegedy (szegedy@or.uni-bonn.de)
Date: Mon Aug 16 2004 - 10:22:44 MDT
Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:
> Anything I can take a bunch of atoms, do, and actually observe, is a
> legitimate experiment. The philosophical conundrum would be whether
> it constitutes a legitimate physical "experiment" to ask, for example,
> "Does this process *ever* halt?" and not just the experiments "Does
> this process halt after finite time T1, T2..."
To me, it seems far from being well-defined. Especially in the context
of mathematical logic.
>
>> You may be able to reduce the notion of physical experiment so skilfully
>> that the outcome of each experiment can be decided by the axioms alone.
>
>
> The obvious restriction would be physical experiments performed in
> bounded time.
I think you have misinterpreted my mail. It is neither necessary nor
sufficient in
general. I don't even know whether it is possible at all. I would not
be surprised that a suitable restriction would necessarily make use of
the fact that
the internal observers knowledge over the whole system is incomplete (cf.
Heisenberg's principle).
The rest of your posting makes sense to me.
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