Dear Glen, > OK. But you must realize that this is not really a _refutation_ or > disproof. It's just one guy (Rosen) arguing with another guy (Günther). > For an actual refutation (proof that Rosen's claim is false), you'd > have to provide an explicit (effective) construction of a computational > living system.
It is neither a mathematically rigorous nor an empirically grounded refutation, I agree, but rather in the sense of Occam's razor/Laplacean "I do not need this hypothesis". > And you haven't done that. [grin] Hence, you haven't proven Rosen wrong > ... yet. ALifers across the planet are working on this constructive > proof feverishly, of course. That proof would then be rigorous, agreed. Have you perchance read Wells, A. J. In Defense of Mechanism Ecological Psychology, 2006, 18, 39-65 ? He takes on Rosen's claims, I have queued the paper for reading, will probably get there in July (have a lot to do at the moment ;-)); and would be glad to continue the conversation. > Or, you could show us specifically where Rosen's claim contradicts the > recursion theorem. But to my knowledge nobody has formalized Rosen's > work to the degree of specificity we'd need to show such a > contradiction. I could easily be wrong about that, of course. So, if > you'll point to such a rigorous formulation of Rosen's claim and > precisely how it contradicts the recursion theorem, then we could say > that one or the other (Rosen's or the recursion theorem) is refuted. Ack, I also think that the problem is that Rosen's ideas are not formalized enough to present a contradiction. Cheers, Günther -- Günther Greindl Department of Philosophy of Science University of Vienna [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.univie.ac.at/Wissenschaftstheorie/ Blog: http://dao.complexitystudies.org/ Site: http://www.complexitystudies.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
