I read a blog post yesterday on npr reviewing a book on the mind and consciousness. NPR - Blogs, Is There a Place for the Mind in Physics? The review was by a physicist of a book by Thomas Nagel that proposed that the mind had an inherent existence. The reviewer, Adam Frank begins by asking the reader to imagine a blue monkey. Is this blue monkey real, or is it just some sort of phenomenon arising from activity of neurons in the brain? If it is real, where is it real? I remember another idea which occurred to some months ago while I was unlocking the shed to free my bicycle. It was locked with a combination lock which I was carefully turning back and forth till it unlatched. It occurred to me that in the physical world, there seemed to be two types of locks, but in the software world, there was apparently only one kind. The first kind of lock in the physical world is a ward lock. A carefully shaped object is used to alter the shape of pins inside so that one is able to turn it. In the case of the second lock, one has some sort of secret knowledge that can be used to adjust the mechanism into some configuration that will allow it to open - a combination lock in other words. Inside a software program, there is apparently only one sort of lock possible, that being the secret knowledge sort. Any sort of method that I thought of to imitate the ward lock worked out generating a random number, that if one were to capture, could be used to open the file.
Thinking further, the combination lock is a mechanical representation of the numbers of the combination. In a sense any sort of computer or calculating device - the brain as well - is something much like the combination lock. It is a mechanical representation of the information in the combination. If one were to actually build Babbage's Analytic Engine, one could construct a program to calculate some value. One could calculate the same value using a modern computer, using essentially the same method as in the program on the Analytic Engine. One could almost certainly generate a protein sequence that would fold in a particular manner to calculate the same value, using the same method. Thus it appears that both the method and the value do not exist in any particular mechanism. They seem to be both everywhere and nowhere.
