On Thursday, August 30, 2012 1:11:55 PM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > > On 29 Aug 2012, at 20:09, Craig Weinberg wrote: > > > > On Wednesday, August 29, 2012 1:22:38 PM UTC-4, William R. Buckley wrote: >> >> >> >> >> Cells are indeed controlled by software (as represented in wetware form – >> i.e. DNA). >> > It isn't really clear exactly what controls what in a living cell. I can > say that cars are controlled by traffic signals, clocks, and calendars. > > To whatever we ascribe control, we only open up another level of > unexplained control beneath it. What makes DNA readable to a ribosome? What > makes anything readable to anything? > > > Encoding and decoding, or application and abstraction, or addition and > multiplication, ... >
My problem is that this implies that a pile of marbles know how many marbles they are. I could rig up a machine that weighs red marbles and then releases an equal weight of white marbles from a chute. Assuming calibrated marbles, there would be the same number, but no enumeration of the marbles has taken place. Nothing has been decoded, abstracted, or read, it's only a simple lever that opens a chute until the pan underneath it gets heavy enough to close the chute. There is no possibility of understanding at all, just a mindless enactment of behaviors. No mind, just machine. To be viable, comp has to explain why these words don't speak English. > > > > Sense is irreducible. > > > From the first person perspective. Yes. For machine's too. > > > No software can control anything, even itself, unless something has the > power to make sense of it as software and the power to execute that sense > within itself as causally efficacious motive. > > > This seems to me like justifying the persistence of the physical laws by > invoking God. It is too quick gap filling for me, and does not explain > anything, as relying on fuzzy vague use of words. I might find sense there, > but in the context of criticizing mechanism, I find that suspicious, to be > frank. > I'm only explaining what comp overlooks. It presumes the possibility of computation without any explanation or understanding of what i/o is. Why does anything need to leave Platonia? How does encoding come to be a possibility and why should it be useful in any way (given a universal language of arithmetic truth). Comp doesn't account for realism, only a toy model of realism which is then passed off as genuine by lack of counterfactual proof - but proof defined only by the narrow confines of the toy model itself. It is the blind man proving that nobody can see by demanding that sight be put into the terms of blindness. Craig > > Bruno > > > http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ > > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/baW65jd5eg4J. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
