[Wittrs] Re: Surveyability (search for computers in the universe)
- From: kirby urner <kirby.urner@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:01:03 -0700
On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 1:43 PM, jrstern<jrstern@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> --- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, kirby urner <kirby.urner@...> wrote:
>>
>> I think you should write a *lot* more on this than just the two
>> paragraphs below.
>
> Well, yes. And formally, and at length, with many footnotes.
>
>> An "attempt to discover" with a worthy end of
>> empowering people to "do whatever it is they want computers to do"
>> is not a project one could argue with, but do you have any sense
>> of what this discovery would be?
>
> I've dropped many broad hints.
>
Ah, a guessing game. Bread crumbs... will I get to gold door at the
end? New gestalts?
Phone call from Steve Holden.... just lost the guy. Called him back
on my cell (he'd got me through land line).
I told him my job was "like Obama's with no pay check" (he was driving
towards beltway so wanted to reach for some local analogy).
Anyway, working on that digital math track railroad, a long slog, more
like what Chinese laborers used to do (but then they'd impress drunks
from Old Town, would Shang Hai 'em through tunnels -- they say).
Lucinda just called to invite mom and me to a talk in Dallas, Oregon
(near Corvallis) re wrongful arrests and imprisonments in the USA, a
huge problem here, Japanese studying it. Rose and Dick thought we'd
like to attend, Lucinda said. Mom not so keen, plus she had a leg
event yesterday, lotsa pain, so we're not going anywhere, Tara either
though she mentioned it'd be good for speech and debate.
>> Wittgenstein sits down in front of a PC, boots Windows, mouses
>> around, goes to some YouTubed lectures on how computers work, has
>> no trouble following. So now what? How was this experience going
>> to effect his ideas about rule-following?
>
> I think he might move towards favoring it,
> starting with the "methodological solipsism" of Fodor.
>
Doing my best here. :)
> But this would require major revisions to his
> writings in PI.
>
>> Then you might tell us what Alan learned from using an iPhone.
>
> That was mostly meant as a joke,
> actually Turing could probably use some
> time hacking around on a workstation, too.
>
He'd probably love having an iPhone. This guy Buzz at Wanderers knows
about the API, talked a blue streak about GPS features this morning,
whereas another of our friends has an article in Better Homes and
Gardens (Don waved it around) -- uploading to Photostream.
>> So far you've not said anything about your new vista, so the
>> burden is still on you, the way I see it, to give us a clue as to
>> what great discovery or discoveries you're talking about.
>
> I must be using the wrong bait.
>
You might not want me to bite actually. Not everyone enjoys that
experience they tell me. From my point of view, its usually just a
love hug, fun and toothless.
>> Anyway, I'll stop using the word "rivalry" since it seems like
>> fingers on a blackboard to ya. I think what you're saying is LW
>> was unconscious of Turing's revelatory ideas, not mindful enough
>> of them. He was ignorant, oblivious.
>
> Do you exclude the possibility that he was
> well-informed, and mistaken about their import?
>
Or just wanted to suppress Turing out of jealousy, would that be more
likely? I think he'd achieved a kind of peace associated with
certainty in our language. He wasn't casting about for any "theory"
which is the main thing. People who haven't read the PI especially
don't get that. They think he was trying to *prove* something, like a
mathematician or scientist would i.e. do some kind of inexorably
persuasive job of selling something bottled (beetle juice, heh). But
it's more like he didn't expect you'd understand, and if you did,
you'd just roar like a lion and then go about your business, whatever
you'd been doing.
> History is full of such stories,
> Mach and atoms, Einstein and quantum theory, Kripke and Quine.
>
> OTOH, sometimes I'm in the reactionary camp myself,
> but the basic storyline is common enough.
>
>> I'm also picking up this (platonic, formalist) versus
>> (constructivist, nominalist) dichotomy. As you know, I think
>> both the Platonist (e.g. St. Augustine, a NeoPlatonist) and the
>> Nominalist fall into the same trap of thinking "the meaning of a
>> word" is something right in front of their faces, whereas it's
>> really all about hypertext and tensegrity
>> (concepts connecting dots across many experiences).
>>
>> What I think woulda really please Wittgenstein was the web, given
>> the way the PI was written. He'd have developed his philosophy as
>> a web site, or linked web sites, no question.
>
> Nominalist, in my flavor at least, which I take to be something
> like LWs, is very deflationary, a word means - what it means, but
> the word itself is just a label, even a string. There is not a
> thing that the word means that is not the word, whatever things
> there are in the world, and however a word is used to refer to them.
> A word does not link to a specific semantic model, any more than
> the letter "a" commits to just some single word.
>
This doesn't sound like my Wittgenstein at all, not in the least. I
think some serious rewiring might be in order.
Forget about words, forget about things...
When Uncle Dave shows up with that knife in his belt, we know that
means he'll be preparing a chicken for dinner (a euphemism for killing
it). Sure enough, there's one less chicken. Seems like a rule --
which is why we say "know that means" in this context.
Some logicians come along and program this computer game where Uncle
Dave is like this *icon* that means "loss of one chicken" i.e.
inventory decrement one whenever he shows up on the screen. That's
just the rule, how we programmed it. So what if the computer dies,
power outage, and no chicken gets eaten this time (the game was
aborted).
"We're not talking about the physical computer fer cryin' out loud,
we're talking about the design of the friggin' game. The rules. It's
logic." Nuff said, they're logicians after all, that's how they're
*programmed* to talk.
> Of course, that leave a lot of story for the nominalist to
> still explain - but I believe that the rest of the story is
> well-learned from looking at programming languages - and then
> can be mapped back to natural languages.
>
> Josh
Wittgenstein was by no stretch of the imagination of nominalist. He
might have been a Platonist, was definitely a mystic (leaves a large
wake in that literature, probably lots more to come in the zen lineage
-- what I anticipate), but he was not really that focused on words in
particular (language is so much more) or on things in particular (he
dismisses those in the first few pages, shows how none of them are
what a word actually means which has more to do with what rules we're
following at the moment, which in turn depends on the namespace (=
language game)).
Kirby
Other related posts:
