[FRIAM] Wolpert - discussion thread placeholder

[Jon Zingale]

I am often confused by what people imagine "tech" to be, and then I
wonder what the forward-looking name for luddite is. From my twisted
perspective, the newest consumables merely add noise, produce another
roll of the dice, and leave us only able to speak about the distance we,
via this stochastic process, are "expected" to be from some origins.
Mostly when I see new consumables I am confused about the excitement,
and where some can only see their potential, I immediately envision
an unremarkable end.

For instance, I have never owned a cell phone, and the longer I watch
others explore this technology, the less impressed I am. It doesn't seem
a strain to imagine a world where they are as disregarded as oil painting
is today. This week, some coworkers asked me where I manage to find
payphones, all-the-while I am stunned that not one of them knows how
computations are performed or what a semiconductor is. As a side-effect
of my ambivalence, new niches have appeared for the likes of me, some in
the form of privacy (as telemarketers leave the domain of landlines or
friends learn that if I do not pick up the phone it is because I am not
home) and others in terms of inheriting the benefits of a distributed
network without needing to be an explicit node. My patience leaves me
wondering how best to identify a luddite.

I mention the above, in part, because entertaining the notion of hyper-
computation is to mod out by what even quantum computing adds to our
understanding of Turing machines. The "tech" in the limit may not be the
iterated colimits of the consumables we see lying around. Instead, it
seems reasonable to read technological enhancement as the quest for
programs not indexed by zahlen, but traced by the reals, and this is
something wholly different than natural selection amplifying small
differences in some initial configuration.

As some on-list may know, I am on a Sean Carroll kick at the moment. In
his paper "Reality as a Vector in Hilbert Space'', he takes on Everrett's
project of developing the classical world from the Schrodinger equation.
This "development" includes the derivation of space-time itself (light
cones and all) from arguments regarding mutual information. Additionally,
there is the assumption (and distinct possibility) that *our* Hilbert
space is finite dimensional, thanks to gravity. Further, in this work,
we see continued discussion around the importance of being able to
factor space into tensored products of (potentially open) systems.
Somewhere in all of this, I can almost see where Wolpert's questions,
Carroll's quest, and the tremendous amount of work being done by Baez
and friends on mereology are all part of a quasi-coherent project,
happening now. Is it willful ignorance to avoid engaging in this work?
At present, I don't feel like I have the tech to judge.
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