Wednesday, January 26, 2011

[Yasmin_discussions] Around Simulation II - Simulating the un-simulatable

Dear all,

sorry for this long pause, I have been involved in affairs which took me away from the computers and the net... Anyway I think we could go on considering some of our discussion's strains.

1) the technical/philosophical status of the simulation

and

2) the uncomputability/un-simulatable issues.

About the first one - the technical status of the simulation and its peculiarity and differences with the representation - I think it would worth discussing.

In particular I think that, although the simulation has undergone a great boost in our digital era, not necessarily it has only to deal with the digital. In fact I see no exclusive bound:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation

One example can be the holographic process. Holograms are probably the best simulations of the real objects, but they are (still) analogic.


The second issue is about the un-simulatability, and I think with Roger that it is very interesting. Maybe that the digital is a part of a great longtime dream which wants to describe (simulate?) the world with the numbers. But according to Gödel "not all can be calculated, formalized and mechanized inside the formal system of the computer" (cit. in Peter Weibel, "Mondi virtuali: i nuovi corpi dell'imperatore", in Pier Luigi Capucci, Realtà del virtuale, Bologna, Clueb, 1993, p. 205. Here Weibel's text in English:
http://www.lampsacus.com/documents/WEIBELEMPERORS.pdf).

Not all what exists can be numerized, computated, calculated, transduced into numbers. The complexity of the world and its working are beyond the possibilities of the computability. Maybe Gödel's incompleteness theorems have definitely shelved David Hilbert's program keen on building a universal mathematic formalism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel's_incompleteness_theorems

And according to Roger Penrose this supposed difference between "what can mechanically be demonstrated" and "what can be recognized as true from humans" shows that the human intelligence has not an algorithmic nature.

http://tinyurl.com/6h3btrj
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose

As I wrote in a previous message, the - digital or not - models and simulations are always reductions of the objects and the phenomena they want to simulate. Not everything can be simulated. But is there anything that can't be simulated at all? Consciousness? What we humans call "intelligence"? How are the artists approaching these topics?

Pier Luigi

--
Pier Luigi Capucci
e-mail: plc@noemalab.org
web: http://www.noemalab.org/plc/plc.html
skype: plcapucci

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