Bruno Marchal wrote: > > At 11:34 08/01/04 +0100, Georges Quenot wrote: > > >I am very willing (maybe too much, that's part of the > >problem) to accept a "Platonic existence" for *the* integers. > >I am far from sure however that this does not involve a > >significant amount of faith. > > Indeed. It needs an infinite act of faith. But I have no problem > with that ...
Unfortunately, it seems that some people do. I am not sure how much I share that faith. As I mentionned, I am willing to but since I could not find some ground to support that willingness, I might be a bit agnostic too. > >There are some objections to > >it and I am not sure that none of them make sense. Also, as > >someone said (if anybody has the original reference, in am > >interested): the desire to believe is a reason to doubt. > >I think that, even if it is true, arithmetic realism needs > >to be postulated (or conjectured) since I can't figure how > >it could be established. > > All right. That's why I explicitly put the AR in the definition of > computationalism. > > About your question "is the universe computable?" the problem > depends on what you mean by "universe". The definition you gave recently > are based on some first person point of view, and even that answer does > not makes things sufficiently less ambiguous to answer. Don't hesitate > to try again. I have no problem with definitions that inculde "some first person point of view". I do not find them so "first person point of view" since I believe that every person I can talk with, using the same "first person point of view", would see the same universe. We could at least say "the universe" in a consistent way among us. I might try again but I would like first to see what others have to say on the subject (to get an idea of in what direction I would need to make things clearer). > You can also read my thesis which bears > on that subject (in french). Yes. I have found the reference too. One of my next readings I think (though I have a pipe quite full...). > You may be interested in learning that at least > the *physical* universe cannot be computable once we postulate the comp > hypothesis (that is mainly the thesis that "I" or "You" are computable; + > Church thesis + AR). The reason is that with comp, as with Everett > (and despite minor errors in Everett on that point), the traditional > psycho-parallelism cannot be maintained. See my URL below for more. > > Why there is no FAQ? Because we are still discussing the meaning of > a lot of terms .... I saw some posts on tentative glossaries of acronyms. Maybe before complex terms, we should focus on "basic" ones like "universe". I would not be upset to encounter definitions for several possible senses of that word. > Welcome, Thanks. Georges.
