TY - JOUR
T1 - Turing-, human- and physical computability
T2 - An unasked question
AU - Dresner, Eli
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgements This research was supported by The Israeli Science Foundation (Grant No. 153/ 2004). I would like to thank Gualtiero Piccinini and Oron Shagrir for their comments.
PY - 2008/9
Y1 - 2008/9
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Church-Turing thesis
KW - Computability
KW - Physical computability
KW - Thesis M
KW - Turing
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=50249139091&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s11023-008-9104-8
DO - 10.1007/s11023-008-9104-8
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AN - SCOPUS:50249139091
SN - 0924-6495
VL - 18
SP - 349
EP - 355
JO - Minds and Machines
JF - Minds and Machines
IS - 3
ER -