For a concrete answer on what the reference machine or low-level language should be, please see this 10-minute live-discussion only about the choice of the reference machine, starting at minute 20 and ending at minute 30: https://www.youtube.com/live/FNfGoQhf2Zw?si=Pg1ppTZmlw1S-3g9&t=1206 After one hour and 18 minutes, I spend another couple of minutes answering a question about the reference formalism. After one hour and 30 minutes into the video, someone asked me whether space aliens would agree with lambda calculus. And in my paper, I have a 3-page discussion on the choice of the reference machine, Section 3.2: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.23194 The reason that I did not suggest that one should derive a reference machine from physics is that arriving at a consensus about the laws of physics will already have required the use of either Occam’s razor, common sense, or intuition, thus making the derivation seem circular, or otherwise, equivalent to choosing a simple reference machine directly based on its commonsensical simplicity in the first place but with extra steps through physics which might be redundant, depending on what exactly Aram’s argument was about.
For a concrete answer on what the reference machine or low-level language should be, please see this 10-minute live-discussion only about the choice of the reference machine, starting at minute 20 and ending at minute 30: https://www.youtube.com/live/FNfGoQhf2Zw?si=Pg1ppTZmlw1S-3g9&t=1206
After one hour and 18 minutes, I spend another couple of minutes answering a question about the reference formalism. After one hour and 30 minutes into the video, someone asked me whether space aliens would agree with lambda calculus.
And in my paper, I have a 3-page discussion on the choice of the reference machine, Section 3.2: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.23194
The reason that I did not suggest that one should derive a reference machine from physics is that arriving at a consensus about the laws of physics will already have required the use of either Occam’s razor, common sense, or intuition, thus making the derivation seem circular, or otherwise, equivalent to choosing a simple reference machine directly based on its commonsensical simplicity in the first place but with extra steps through physics which might be redundant, depending on what exactly Aram’s argument was about.