On Nov 14, 2008, at 11:22 AM, Brent Meeker wrote: > For a non-materialist it seems that an un-implemented > idea or program is an incoherent concept. So for the non-materialist > there can be no such distinction as "implemented" or "not > implemented".
I can't answer for Bruno, but in my formulation, I would say that we can talk about "un-implemented" programs as long as we understand that we just mean "un-implemented in our particular world". Imagine again the mathematical description of Conway's Life applied to the binary digits of PI. Somewhere within that description there may be descriptions of beings who have built their own computers (which would ultimately be made out of "gliders" and so on). In that mundane sense, those beings "perform computations" and "implement programs" within that world. Even if those beings accepted what I'm calling Mathematical Physicalism, they could still talk about un-implemented programs, but they'd just mean "unimplemented by us in this particular world". The same goes for "existence" and "non-existence". As a Mathematical Physicalist, I believe that "everything exists" (at least, everything that's mathematically describable). But it's still convenient to say things like "Unicorns don't exist", by which I just mean that they (probably) don't exist in my particular world. (And by "my particular world", I really mean the cloud of worlds represented by all my possible future states and all my possible past states. And so on.) -- Kory --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
