On Sat, Apr 13, 2013 at 2:05 PM, Nicholas Thompson < [email protected]> wrote:
> Can anybody translate this for a non programmer person? > > > Nick's question brings up a project I'd love to see: an attempt at an isomorphism between computation and philosophy. (An isomorphism is a 1 to 1, onto mapping from one to another, or a bijection.) For example, in computer science, "decidability" is a very concrete idea. Yet when I hear philosophical terms, and dutifully look them up in the stanford dictionary of philosophy, I find myself suspicious of circularity. Decidability is interesting because it proves not all computations can successfully expressed as "programs". It does this by using two infinities of different cardinality (countable vs continuum). Does philosophy deal in constructs that nicely map onto computing, possibly programming languages? I'm not specifically concerned with decidability, only use that as an example because it shows the struggle in computer science for modeling computation itself, from Finite Automata, Context Free Languages, and to Turing Machines (or equivalently lambda calculus). I don't dislike philosophy, mainly thanks to conversations with Nick. And I do know that axiomatic approaches to philosophy have been popular. So is there a possible isomorphism? -- Owen
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