Church-Turing thesis invoked: "just manipulating numbers" says nothing about emergence
austinc3301 · x · 2026-09-25
@austinc3301 continued his rebuttal to @davetroy's "programs just manipulate numbers" argument: per the computational Church-Turing thesis, any physical system can be equivalently expressed as some manipulation of numbers, so reductionism at that level is no lens for grasping the emergent properties of a new system — including LLMs.
Related event: Debate Erupts Over AI Writing as 'Programs Just Manipulate Numbers'(3 posts)→
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