Evgeniy: although I had my disagreements with Stuart dating back to prior to the 1997 Nashua Conference, I have to agree here. Turing was a great mind, his ideas leading to our (embryonic, binary) computing machine are great, it is not the ultimate word. I wonder how much Bruno's (Loeb's) universal machine is such? So far we have no better one, the Turingesque contraption is our miraculous panacea to lots of things, but it may have its limitations and disadvantages. Screwdriver, or not.
John M On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 3:38 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi <use...@rudnyi.ru> wrote: > I am reading now Beyond Mechanism: Putting Life back into Biology. In > Foreword: Evolution beyond Newton, Darwin, and Entailing Law, Stuart A. > Kauffman writes: > > p. 9 "Here is the first 'strange' step. Can you name all the uses of a > screwdriver, alone, or with other objects or process? Well, screw in a a > screw, open a paint can, wedge open a door, wedge closed a door, scrape > putty off a window, stab an assailant, be an objet d'art, tied to a stick a > fish spear, the spear rented to 'natives' for a 5 percent fish catch return > becomes a new business, and so on. I think that we all are convinced that > the following two statements are true: (1) the number of uses of a screw > driver is indefinite; and (2) unlike the integers which can be ordered, > there is no natural ordering of the uses of a screw driver. The uses are > unordered. But these two claims entail that there is no 'Turing Effective > Procedure' to list all the uses of a screwdriver alone or with other > objects or processes. In short, there is no algorithm to list all the uses > of a screwdriver." > > Any comment? > > Evgenii > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to > everything-list+unsubscribe@**googlegroups.com<everything-list%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com> > . > To post to this group, send email to > everything-list@googlegroups.**com<everything-list@googlegroups.com> > . > Visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/**group/everything-list?hl=en<http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en> > . > For more options, visit > https://groups.google.com/**groups/opt_out<https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out> > . > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
