Rewrite Science - The Universal Semantic Calculus and Grammatical Cosmos
Symposium 10A - CASYS 07

Common Sense **(what is it?) and the Church Turing Hypothesis
P.J. Marcer
55 rue Jean Jaures, 83600 Frejus, Var France.
peter.marcer@orange.fr

Keywords: common sense, universal Turing computation, Church Turing Hypothesis, universal quantum computation, Church Turing Principle, the intuitionist theory of types, quantum theory.

Abstract

Throughout my now 50 years in the computing I have long felt that computation in all its forms is a matter of common sense, i.e. ** sound practical judgement - English dictionary.

This paper provides a definition of common sense as an essential element in the solution of problems of machine intelligence, which proceeds from the conclusion that the logical form of mathematical language is subject to a logical depth grammar which constitutes its common sense of mathematical language sentence construction, and that it is these same rules of construction that quantum computation imposes on the domains of functionality of Turing computability. That is, common sense is both the 'deep syntax' of natural physical processes and governs the basic semantics of the logic of mathematical language. What better definition for sound practical judgement?

For clarity the original paper was divided into non technical and technical sections, when it was first presented at the British Theoretical Computer Science Colloquium at the University of Warwick in March 24-26, 1986, when only the abstract, as I recently discovered, was later published. A briefer technical section now appears as an appendix.