Oh, gosh, owen. I am trying to think of somebody to forward this on to. Dennett would be the obvious guy, but he only rarely answers my mail.
Eric, can you think of somebody in your acquaintance who would be willing to comment on reference always introduces ambiguity, or whether there is an in principle distinction between applied math and philosophical argument. Nick From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Owen Densmore Sent: Tuesday, April 16, 2013 9:12 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Isomorphism between computation and philosophy 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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