Owen Densmore wrote at 04/17/2013 01:53 PM:
> Er,, of course there are many, right? With two finite sets of size N there
> are N! 1-1, onto unique mappings, I believe.
Heh, there are way more than that! What I meant was that there exist
more than 1 morphism that results in the same snapshot of the mapping. E.g.
{0, 1, 2} -> {ooga, booga, slooga} via
0 -> ooga
1 -> booga
2 -> slooga
But there can be any number of meanings inside the "->". All that's
being represented by the morphism is that one goes to the other. The
"going" is opaque, c.f. the other part of our conversation. (I think
it's funny that we use this word "morphism" so often without remembering
the "to morph" part of it.)
> All I'm curious about is whether or not it is possible to somehow make
> philosophy, or simply intellectual conversation a bit more concrete.
Hm. I'm actually on Nick's side of that discussion. Philosophy is
_more_ concrete than computing. Even when it's abstract, it relies on
the thoughts and actions of people (or animals or inanimate objects).
Computing is, like mathematics, more symbolic.
Perhaps the word you're looking for is _definite_?
> Wouldn't you think computation and algorithms could express at least an
> interesting subset of intellectual discourse?
Not really. Like I was trying to address in the other thread on
iteration vs. recursion, discourse (including intellectual) is messy,
which is whence it derives its usefulness. The same can be said of
things like jury trials. The interestingness doesn't lie in the
abstract "law" as defined for the average (or median or whatever) human.
The interestingness lies in the special cases. Although much
philosophy pretends that it's trying to find some normative basis for
thought, what I see, mostly, is humans trying to be human ... aka messy.
> Unfortunately, some of the philosophic conversations I hear are poorly
> motivated and lack MS's great skill at driving people towards wanting
> understanding.
Sturgeon's quote comes to mind: Ninety percent of science fiction is
crud, but that's because ninety percent of everything is crud.
--
=><= glen e. p. ropella
In this world where I am king
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