[Wittrs] Re: Following a rule
- From: "jrstern" <jrstern@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 13 Sep 2009 15:30:30 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "iro3isdx" <xznwrjnk-evca@...> wrote:
>
> Yes, indeed. But then the world we live in is also a convenient
> fiction. I am not, at all, denying that there is a physical
> reality. However, the world we live in contains banks,
> restaurants, highways, and all kinds of other stuff which are
> really part of the social/cultural world, and that in turn is a
> convenient fiction. Shakespeare seems to have beaten us to this
> observation, with his "All the world's a stage".
>
>
> > I can't answer for the "levels" talk that permeates CTM and
> > philosophy of mind generally.
>
> I think it poses a problem for the more physicalist views that
> come up in AI discussions - the views of Eray, for example.
> For it seems clear that much of what is described in CTM occurs
> at the level of convenient fictions, rather than at the physical
> level.
Isn't that a good thing, if a physicalist theory of computation
gives rise to a CTM that covers all of these "convenient fictions"?
I just want to point something out, regarding rules, agents,
fictions, and the world. I don't know if a highway or a bank is
a thing, or what sort of thing it is. I'm not trying to know,
and perhaps I'm trying not to know.
The rules, or what may be rules, and the following, or what may
be following, that *I* am talking about, are all within a computer
program, and/or perhaps in a mind - computer and/or mind I abbreviate
as "agent". An agent is free to construct convenient fictions.
They (rules) are not being asserted as science or norms or
ontologically real outside of the agent.
LW's discussions about rule following are also of this sort,
though he wanders into mathematical proof theory, and a logicist
may mistake that for being the same thing. That is, LW talks
only about humans as agents, and assumes machines are in some
other category. He assumes, but I cannot think of where he
actually discusses, to what degree a machine can or must underlay
what a human does.
Josh
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