On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 6:10 PM, Nicholas Thompson < nickthomp...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> I don’t think I said that math couldn’t be mapped onto things. I only > said that such mappings are not essential to math and, further, that when > such mappings occur, the door is opened for confusion that is opened in any > semantic relation. > Could you show me such a thing? I demonstrated that computers for example do not suffer from this confusion. Computing is a branch of mathematics that looked inward and found it could provide real world mappings from 5-tuples defining a computing engine (the FSA) to real computers. Every time you step on the in/out mat for a door at a store, you are implementing a FSA. (Note I bow to your "door" above :) Call it "Applied Mathematics" if you'd prefer. But it certainly has a very high reality coefficient. There is no ambiguity and there is semantic binding. (Note: I realize that ABM does deal with this, and we've dealt with it with your MOTH model, but it is not necessarily general.) Let me simplify. Is there a realm in which philosophy can exhibit a bug? And more specifically by simply "running" the philosophy engine? I believe this may be possible, but I'm not sure. Maybe we'd have to create a new field. Certainly Turing, Church, von Neumann, Shannon, and many other in the computational world did. They stood on a brink, vital for going forward. Von Neumann had to argue for a computer to be admitted to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton .. it was considered just a machine. Church and Turing showed that to be nonsense. Can we do the same for philosophy? NB: I'm not referring to "computational complexity" in which we deal with the running time issues of an algorithm, but to the semantics of computation itself. We really do have a strong grasp on what computation is and we do not quibble about meaning .. at least without heading immediately to axiomatic solutions. -- Owen
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