Glen, I liked this, particularly its Bayesian conclusion (!?), but I wont be able to comment thoughtfully on it for several hours.
Thanks, though, N -----Original Message----- From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of glen Sent: Wednesday, April 17, 2013 3:13 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Isomorphism between computation and philosophy Owen Densmore wrote at 04/17/2013 01:53 PM: > Er,, of course there are many, right? With two finite sets of size N > there are N! 1-1, onto unique mappings, I believe. Heh, there are way more than that! What I meant was that there exist more than 1 morphism that results in the same snapshot of the mapping. E.g. {0, 1, 2} -> {ooga, booga, slooga} via 0 -> ooga 1 -> booga 2 -> slooga But there can be any number of meanings inside the "->". All that's being represented by the morphism is that one goes to the other. The "going" is opaque, c.f. the other part of our conversation. (I think it's funny that we use this word "morphism" so often without remembering the "to morph" part of it.) > All I'm curious about is whether or not it is possible to somehow make > philosophy, or simply intellectual conversation a bit more concrete. Hm. I'm actually on Nick's side of that discussion. Philosophy is _more_ concrete than computing. Even when it's abstract, it relies on the thoughts and actions of people (or animals or inanimate objects). Computing is, like mathematics, more symbolic. Perhaps the word you're looking for is _definite_? > Wouldn't you think computation and algorithms could express at least > an interesting subset of intellectual discourse? Not really. Like I was trying to address in the other thread on iteration vs. recursion, discourse (including intellectual) is messy, which is whence it derives its usefulness. The same can be said of things like jury trials. The interestingness doesn't lie in the abstract "law" as defined for the average (or median or whatever) human. The interestingness lies in the special cases. Although much philosophy pretends that it's trying to find some normative basis for thought, what I see, mostly, is humans trying to be human ... aka messy. > Unfortunately, some of the philosophic conversations I hear are poorly > motivated and lack MS's great skill at driving people towards wanting > understanding. Sturgeon's quote comes to mind: Ninety percent of science fiction is crud, but that's because ninety percent of everything is crud. -- =><= glen e. p. ropella In this world where I am king ============================================================ 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
