Subject:
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Re: Libertarian debate in danger of pollution (was Re: Will Libertopia cause the needy to get less?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Thu, 30 Nov 2000 18:47:53 GMT
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Viewed:
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1201 times
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Larry Pieniazek wrote:
> As I've said before, I'm willing to admit the possible existence of a god
> that has no tangible effect on the observable universe and cannot be proven
> or disproven to exist. (this god either permeates our universal structure,
> or exists in another set of dimensions or parallel universe, your choice)
>
> But for a god to be of any significance (other than as an internal comfort
> to those who *must* have some higher power to believe in, and that ain't me)
> that god must be able to have tangible effect on something. And *that*, no
> religion has ever been able to prove.
Well, it is still possible for a god to have had a tangible effect, in
that it is possible that our universe is just an incredibly good
simulation running in another universe. Then "god" would be the
programmer who wrote the simulation... Of course that really doesn't
have much relevance. If the only tangible effect "god" has is writing
the program and pushing "start", that effect is mostly irrelevant to the
simulation.
An interesting question is whether it is possible for a simulation to
detect an error in its programming without being aware that the data it
is processing is external input. You might jump up and immediately say
"yes", take the following program:
void main() {
int a;
printf("Type '1'\n");
scanf("%d", a);
if (a != 1) printf("Internal consistency error\n");
}
because you might claim the program has no resources to detect that the
value of a is dependant on external input, but actually it does,
ultimately somewhere in the system, it is accepting external input by
design, so this program isn't detecting an internal error, just
declaring a reaction to external input that it was told to use.
Of course here is a trivial example which might count as being able to
detect an error in programming:
void main () {
int a = 1;
int b = 0;
#optimization_level none
/* whatever you need to do to make the compiler not trivially reject
the program */
a / b;
}
The system will quite clearly detect the error. On the other hand, can
the system actually determine that this is not what was intended? I'm
not sure.
--
Frank Filz
-----------------------------
Work: mailto:ffilz@us.ibm.com (business only please)
Home: mailto:ffilz@mindspring.com
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