I can't even pretend to understand what y'all are talking about. But I do have a couple of questions and a bit of a tangent to apply. Feel free to ignore the tangent. The questions are more important.
Question 1: Why does TANSTAAFL only carry traction (whatever that means) in edge/corner cases? Question 2: What does "well-formed" mean in this concept of computation? Tangent: The Carnot-type limit, in my ignorance, rang the bell of an argument I'm in with a couple of friends. They're both [macro]biologists; so I'm the ultracrepidarian, here. But they have faith that biodiversity (both macro and micro) is obviously lower in urban environments than in wild or rural environments. My argument is that the measures of diversity make up a wild landscape in and of themselves. Were we to take a multiverse analysis <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse_analysis> approach to such a question, would the various diversity measures [dis]agree? I mean, it is obvious that there's a dearth of some types of species in urban environments (e.g. types of plants and animals). But there are lots of the ones that are there (humans, rats, pets, potted plants, etc.). And the rhetorical leverage from "low macro diversity" to "low micro diversity" seems too *obvious* to be true... much like when a huckster offers a deal that's too good to be true. Not only is this question not "well-formed", one's faith in their preferred answer feels almost cult-like, where the priests' answer is so completely accepted that the skeptic is ostracized as a contrarian for asking for a demonstration of the evidence. On 1/11/25 12:18, steve smith wrote:
it feels like a TANSTAAFL argument which only carries traction in edge/corner cases, though computing in biologic and (other) molecular scale contexts might well make that trade (to avoid thermal problems)? Whether Universal Assembler NT or biologic self-assembly "circuits".
On 1/11/25 13:56, Santafe wrote:
Then what is the premise of computation? It is that every statement of a well-formed question already contains its answer; the problem is just that the answer is hard to see because it is distributed among the bits of the question statement, along with other things that aren’t the answer.
On 1/11/25 13:56, Santafe wrote:
[...] everything we do works because we are tiny and care about only a few things, with which we interact stochastically, and the world tolerates us in doing so. In that world, returning the slag to the Source of Questions should create a kind of chemical potential for interesting questions, in which, like ores that become more and more rarified, finding the interesting questions among the slag that one won’t dispose of gets harder and harder. So there should be Carnot-type limits that tell asymptotically what the minimal total waste could be to extract all the questions we will ever care about from the Source of Questions, retuning as much slag as possible over the whole course, and dissipating only that part that defines the boundaries of our interest. That Carnot limit could be considerably less wasteful than our non-look-ahead Landauer bound, but it isn’t zero. And the Maxwell Deamon cost of the look-ahead needed to recycle the slag in an optimal manner presumably also diverges, by a block-coding kind of scaling argument.
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