Quantum Loop Gravity Be For Whitey

[Tim May]

I'll comment on the sociology after commenting on the physics:

(actually, looking over your sociology, I see it's just more of the 
liberal whine and sleaze, so I won't bother commenting on it again)

On Jan 1, 2004, at 6:34 PM, Tyler Durden wrote:

> Tim May wrote...
>
>> Then your education in physics about von Neumann is sorely lacking. 
>> Von Neumann spend part of several years investigating 
>> self-replicating machines, using some ideas of Ulam and others. 
>> Well-covered in the cellular automata literature.
>
> As you can probably tell, I've never read many secondary or tertiary 
> sources. (ie, as a physicist I've always considered it of dubious 
> usefulness to read ABOUT physics...) I've only read the few more 
> famous von Neumann journal articles I've come across w.r.t. cellular 
> automata...I actually thought he had only written two or three, and I 
> don't remember his ideas of self-replicating machines as including 
> something like a GA, but then again it's easily possible I didn't pick 
> up on the ramifications of what I was reading (which is granted when I 
> was much younger).

The last refuge of the scoundrel is to dismiss stuff as "secondary and 
tertiary sources," sort of like the fakers I used to meet in college 
who nattered on about having learned their physics from Newton's 
"Principia" instead of from secondary and tertiary sources.

I encountered von Neumann's work on self-replicating machines when I 
was in high school (*). It came up in connection with the Fermi paradox 
and in issues of life (this was before the term "artificial life" was 
au courant...I was at the first A-LIFE Conference in '87...von Neumann 
couldn't make it).

(* And no, I don't know mean my high school teachers taught us about 
von Neumann machines. 97% of the science I knew by the time I graduated 
from high school I'd learned on my own, from the usual "secondary and 
tertiary sources.")

A few moments of thought will show the connection between replicators 
and general assemblers. A general assembler can make another general 
assembler, hence all general assemblers are replicators.  And in fact 
this is necessary to make mechanosynthesis nanotech viable, as 
otherwise it takes all the multibillion dollar wafer fabs in the world, 
if they could make nanoscale things, to make some scum on the bottom of 
a test tube. GAs only start to become possible after the replication 
problem has been solved (which it has not, despite claims about 
self-reproducing software structures and train sets and the like).

If you are not aware of basic developments, recall Wittgenstein's 
maxim: "Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent."	

>
--Tim May
"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a 
monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also 
into you." -- Nietzsche