I thought Bertrand Russell WAS the isomorphism between philosophy and computation!
Ach! Aging isn't for weaklings. N From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Tuesday, April 16, 2013 10:30 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Isomorphism between computation and philosophy Doug - Thanks for weighing in here... as an aside, I skimmed "Garden World" and found it compelling... I hope others here will take the time! On the thread topic, it would be rather "convenient" in many ways if there were such an isomorphism as Owen seeks (postulates), but I find it to reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of "what is knowledge"? Other parts of the thread, relating to the question of semantics begins to address this. Intuitively, it is like thinking that one can make visual art without awareness of the negative space and the context it exists in, or of writing poetry (or really anything but the driest of prose as well?) without appreciating that it much of what is being said is "between the lines". I have a friend who wrote a program to parse and analyze the logic in Aquinas' Summa Theologica and claimed to find numerous (but not outrageous) simple errors in his logic. That isn't in any way close to imagining that one could translate such a text into symbolic logic and determine anything (else) more significant from it than internal consistency and/or consistency with some external axiomatic system. - Steve Philosophy is very broad and includes many things like ethics and anesthetics. A good test case would be not logic, but poetry. Blessings, Doug http://dougcarmichael.com http://gardenworldpolitics.com On Apr 16, 2013, at 9:25 AM, Owen Densmore <[email protected]> wrote: 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 ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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