On Fri, 23 Mar 2012, Elliott Hird wrote: > Looks OK to me, except that your self-ownership thing is borked: your > recursion rules only apply if that /doesn't/, so it will never be > found to own itself per that process. You'll have to work it into the > process itself, keeping track of the names seen along the way, like > manually maintaining a stack. > > Although it might suffice simply to say "If this process would not > terminate, the golem is instead Emancipated."; the courts can solve > the halting problem.
I thought about defining the circularity "if following the ownership chain you get back to yourself..." and then just figured the self- evident common definition would suffice for the starting condition. So yes, it's a purposeful mix of common definition followed by procedure. Interestingly, this exact issue of how Courts deal pretty easily with halting problems (or procedural circularity in general) was the subject of an exchange of letters between Hofstadter and a law professional (republished in Metamagical Themas): Law professor: "it's trivial and uninteresting to the court; a judge can easily see what is meant and determine that there's circularity." Hofstadter: "yes, but isn't it interesting that humans can do that so adeptly!"
