[Wittrs] Re: Nominalism / Neil
- From: "iro3isdx" <xznwrjnk-evca@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 09 Sep 2009 03:20:51 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "jrstern" <jrstern@...> wrote:
> Symbol, to me, is first of all a physical particular.
No, that does not work.
Think back to November, 2000 and the election in Florida. We had this
little problem of "hanging chads".
If symbol is a physical particular, and computation is done with such
physical particulars, then the punch cards were the physical
particulars that represented the votes. If the computation was dealing
with those physical particulars, then dealing with hanging chads is
part of computation. And, in that case, Turing's thesis completely
fails for it does not handle the case of hanging chads.
If, on the other hand, a symbol is an ideal object created by human
intentions, then dealing with the hanging chads happened outside of any
computation. Rather, the chads were dealt with as part of constructing
the ideal objects to be tallied in the vote total computation. And, in
that case, Turing's theory applies quite well.
> What happens must follow from the physical particular
> of a symbol, it is given a reference - to an algorithm,
> I suppose - by some agency (eg, a mathematician).
You are making mathematics totally magically, and thoroughly
inexplicable. There is nothing in mathematics that even speaks of
physical particulars. So all known mathematics must be completely
wrong.
I'll suggest you are looking at this wrongly.
If you want to discuss everything in physical terms, then the computer
on my desk is a mechanical device, or perhaps I should call it an
electro-mechanical device. The physical operation of the computer,
including any physical outputs, can be completely explained in terms of
its nature as an electro-mechanical device. There is no important
dependence on human intention when using that electro-mechanical
account of the computer's operations.
We have two different language games here. In one game we can describe
the computer as an electro-mechanical device. And no human intentions
are involved (except in the sense that the description itself is
intentional). In the other language game, we describe the computer in
terms of logical and computation operations. And human intentions are
heavily involved in that second (computational) description. The
notion of reference does not fit at all into the electro-mechanical
language game. And the notion of physical particular does not fit at
all into the logical/computational language game. You are trying to
combine these into a single combined language game, but it does not
cohere.
>> Turing is using symbols in just that way. If his symbols
>> referred, then his paper would be about the particular
>> ..
> Please give me an example from the paper that we
> can try to work through.
It runs through the entire paper. There is nowhere that I can see,
where he deals with physical particulars such as hanging chads or
blurry ink marks.
Regards,
Neil
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