Turing-, human- and physical computability: An unasked question

Eli Dresner*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

In recent years it has been convincingly argued that the Church-Turing thesis concerns the bounds of human computability: The thesis was presented and justified as formally delineating the class of functions that can be computed by a human carrying out an algorithm. Thus the Thesis needs to be distinguished from the so-called Physical Church-Turing thesis (or Thesis M), according to which all physically computable functions are Turing computable. The latter is often claimed to be false, or, if true, contingently so. On all accounts, though, thesis M is not easy to give counterexamples to, but it is never asked why-how come that a thesis that transfers a notion from the strictly human domain to the general physical domain just happens to be so difficult to falsify (or even to be true). In this paper I articulate this question and consider several tentative answers to it.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)349-355
Number of pages7
JournalMinds and Machines
Volume18
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 2008

Funding

FundersFunder number
Israel Science Foundation153/ 2004

    Keywords

    • Church-Turing thesis
    • Computability
    • Physical computability
    • Thesis M
    • Turing

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