Premise and Mission Statement
In science, Nature sets the rules, but it must never be forgotten
that it is only because life has exploited these rules successfully
for billions of years to our evolutionary advantage, that human
brains are able to understand them. The mission, at the physical foundations
of computing/information processing if one accepts the premise,
is therefore to identify how these rules were exploited to achieve
this end.
With the remarkable quantum mechanical discovery in 2003 of Diaz and Rowlands of the universal nilpotent quantum computational rewrite system, the Group’s Premise becomes :-
An Evolutionary ‘Anthropic’ Semantic Principle
This new Principle is in line with J.A. Wheeler’s 1986 hypothesis of ‘Physical Law without Law’, that the physical foundations of computation constitute ‘a Meaning Circuit’ or ‘bootstrap’ able to determine physical law without any prior knowledge of what that law maybe. This bootstrap arises from the fact that, while such law must be describable in algorithmic form, any such description (of the law) can have no meaning unless there exist actual physical processes by means of which to execute it (the algorithm).
Thus the universal semantic language of physics (specified by the computational rewrite system with its universal grammar and infinite alphabet) may not only be expressed in words, but includes those physical processes by means of which these words can be spoken and by implication, the means by which they can be understood by beings with a universal semantic language capability such as ourselves. That is to say, human intelligence is nature’s universal capability for semantic correctness as well as correct syntax, which distinguishes us (and by implication, the DNA/RNA genetic code too, that bootstrapped us into existence) from the artificial intelligence of universal digital computation.
Wheeler J.A. 1986, Physics as Meaning Circuit: Three Problems, Frontiers of Non-equilibrium Statistical Physics, editors Moore G.T. and Scully M.O. Plenum Press, New York & Landauer, R. 1986, Computation and Physics: Wheeler’s Meaning Circuit? Foundations of Physics, 16, 6. June, 551-564.
