> On 28 Feb 2020, at 03:34, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List > <[email protected]> wrote: > > >> On Thursday, February 27, 2020 at 6:11:49 AM UTC-6, Bruno Marchal wrote: >> >> > On 26 Feb 2020, at 21:36, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List >> > <[email protected] <javascript:>> wrote: >> > >> > >> > >> > On 2/26/2020 2:48 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: >> >>> Being sure of that sentence is true, "Dr Watson was a friend of >> >>> Sherlock Holmes." doesn't mean the things named in the sentence exist. >> >> >> >> It certainly means that Watson and Homes exist, in some sense. The >> >> question is “is that sense interesting with respect to our goal of >> >> explaining "everything” (matter and consciousness) in a coherent way? >> > >> > They exist in exactly the same way arithmetic and Turing machines exist. >> >> >> Really? >> >> The difference is that arithmetic is used by all physicists, mathematicians, >> economists, and that if you are mistaken about their relations, your rocket >> might blow up, or miss the moon. >> >> But if you are wrong about Watson or Holmes, you might just get a bad note >> at your English literature course. > > But not if you were studying how a detective should solve a crime. And if > you were mistaken about the methods you might fail to solve the crime.
You illustrate my point. Studying crime is real stuff, like arithmetic. In this case, you are using fictions to put some light on a possible “real” case, and that makes the difference. How would you answer the question “is Holmes smoking a pipe made from atoms”? If you treat Holmes like a machine Turing, you get paradoxes here: as you will need to say that “all pipes are made of atoms”, “everything made of atoms is physically real”, “Holmes smokes a pipe”, so Holmes’s pipe is physically real”. So Homes is more real than Turing machine, which are typically not made of atoms. Bruno > > Brent > >> >> Bruno >> > > > -- > 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 [email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/46975872-d483-3de5-9e0a-ddff29c9f70e%40verizon.net > > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/46975872-d483-3de5-9e0a-ddff29c9f70e%40verizon.net?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>. -- 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 [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/368E78AB-0638-485D-870B-1A767F85C5AA%40ulb.ac.be.
