On 2/28/2020 12:14 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 28 Feb 2020, at 03:34, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
<[email protected]
<mailto:[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”?
No, he's smoking a pipe imagined by Conan Doyle (who didn't even believe
in atoms).
Brent
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
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