On Thursday, June 30, 2016 at 11:33:58 PM UTC+5:30, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > On Fri, 1 Jul 2016 01:28 am, Rustom Mody wrote: > > > On Thursday, June 30, 2016 at 1:55:18 PM UTC+5:30, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > > > >> you state that Turing "believes in souls" and that he "wishes to > >> put the soul into the machine" -- what do his religious beliefs have to > >> do with his work? > > > > Bizarre question -- becomes more patently ridiculous when put into general > > form "What does what I do have to do with what I believe?" > > Lots of people do things that go against their beliefs, or their beliefs (at > least, their professed beliefs) go against what they do. But I'll ask > again: in what way does Turing's supposed beliefs about souls have anything > to do with his mathematical work? > > Let's be concrete: > > In what way does the Halting Problem depend on the existence (or > non-existence) of the soul? > > How was his work on breaking German military codes during World War 2 > reliant on these supposed souls? (In the sense of a separate, non-material > spirit, not in the figurative sense that all people are "souls".) > > > > More specifically the implied suggested equation "soul = religious" > > is your own belief. See particularly "Christian faith" in the quote > > below. > > Of course belief in souls is a religious belief. It certainly isn't a > scientific belief, or a materialistic belief. > > Don't make the mistake of thinking that materialism is a religious belief. > It is no more a religious belief than "bald" is a hair colour. > > <snip> > > What reason do you have for claiming that Kronecker objected to > non-algebraic numbers? Nothing I have read about him suggests that he was > more accepting of algebraic reals than non-algebraic reals. > > (I'm not even sure if mathematicians in Kronecker's day distinguished > between the two.) >
Lots of questions... I would guess rhetorical. However under the assumption that they are genuine (or could be genuine for others than you), I went back and checked. I recollected that I started thinking along these lines — viz. that philosophical disputes led to the genesis of computers — after reading an essay by a certain Adam Siepel... which subsequently seems to have fallen off the net I tracked him down and re-posted his essay here: http://blog.languager.org/2016/07/mechanism-romanticism-computers.html Just to be clear — this is Dr. Adam Siepel's writing reposted with his permission -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
