[FRIAM] Ordinary logic

[Steve Smith]

this discussion lead my free-associative, somewhat atrophied brain (or 
is it mind?) back to this paper:

    Digital Information Mechanics, Edward Fredkin 1981
    http://52.7.130.124/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/PhysicistModelofComputation.pdf

which I was surprised to find online (I think I have looked before).  I 
have a (very yellowed) paper copy of this in a dusty box at the bottom 
of a dusty stack of boxes somewhere.  I am about to re-read it (online) 
but felt I would just tangent wildly (as I am wont to do) if I did so 
before sending it to the group for your own thoughts.

Fredkin himself handed me the paper copy when I met him at the Cellular 
Automata conference at LANL in 1983.  I was incredibly green at the time 
and quite eager in many dimensions, but this particular 
workshop/conference really blew me away in it's combination of 
abstractions and concrete examples. From Wolfram's 4 categories of CA to 
meeting Conway, to seeing Crutchfield's video-feedback-as-CA, to having 
Feynman hisself introduce the Toffoli Gate and Drexler's work that 
became "Engines of Creation" in the context of reeling out his circa 
1957 "Plenty of Room at the Bottom" talk.  If I remember right, Margolis 
and/or Tofolli had a Toffoli-gate based CA hardware device at the 
conference that they couldn't quite keep running.  Also, Gosper's 
memoised implementation of GoL added a whole other set of entropic 
implications with allusions to digital physics implied.

I don't fully subscribe to the variations on Fredkin's "Digital 
Physics/Philosophy" or Wheeler's "It from Bit" and as hard as I try I 
can't penetrate far enough into Wolfram's variations to do more than 
wish I could and wonder if there is meaning (relevance?) in there?


>
>  Frank -
>> Formal logic is not a god but exists independently of nervous systems.
>>
>> A -> B   <->   -B -> -A
>>
> But is it *relevant* to anything independent of (central?) nervous 
> systems?
>
> I know this isn't precisely what you meant, but I would suggest that 
> formal logic and gods have more in common than not, being both 
> artifacts *of* special kinds of symbols and transformation systems for 
> them.  I don't know that molluscs (even cephalapods) have formal 
> logics nor gods (though they may well be capable of some kind of 
> arcane modeling and prediction that is in some sense equally 
> powerful/useful/interesting).
>
> - Steve
>
> PS.  I liked EricCs reformulation of the scenario, it fit well how *I* 
> parsed and sorted things out.
>
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