Well, first, Owen, you should know that I am not a philosopher, but more a philosopher groupie, drawn to philosophers by their ability to help me be coherent . that is, to help me make the thoughts in one part of my thinking consistent with my thoughts in others.
In my teaching career, I have always proceeded on the (Pragmatist) assumption that if people talk long enough they will come to an understanding of one another. But . I shudder to admit it . I am beginning to think that this is a pipe dream. Actually, I have come a long way to your view about philosophy . that philosophers aren't really trying to come to terms and that - worse - it is perhaps impossible for them to do so. That is, while philosophy might be helpful in pointing out incoherences in my thought, philosophers are not dedicated to becoming coherent amongst themselves. I am not at all sure how I could go back to teaching having come to these conclusions. It's probably a good thing that I retired before I got wise. Translatability has been a crucial issue in modern analytical philosophy. Translation implies that you and I have the same piano and that, while we may call the keys by different names, there is a key on your piano that corresponds to every key on mine. But philosophers have more or less given up on translateablity, I think. Still, I am tempted to start with the assumption that there is a word, or small group of words, in my vocabulary that corresponds to your word, undecideable. Can you guess at what those words might be? Nick From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Owen Densmore Sent: Tuesday, April 16, 2013 10:26 AM To: Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] Isomorphism between computation and philosophy 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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