The measurement problem in artificial world models

The only epistemic relations between the world and organisms are established through evolution by natural selection, and learning by observation and measurement. In physics, measurements map an open domain of physical structure to a closed set of symbols. A basic problem in simulating evolution and measurement is that neither activity can be adequately formalized. Artificial world models based on programmable computers require a formalized domain of symbols in which the concepts of evolution and measurement are limited. The measurement problem also bears on the questions of the relation of computation to physics and to formal symbol systems and on what sense dissipationless computation is a useful concept.