ok, but we are confined to the inanimate here? What natural inanimate objects do symbolic manipulation?
Sent from my iPhone > On May 25, 2017, at 4:57 PM, glen ☣ <[email protected]> wrote: > > I agree for the most part. But what M&V and Rosen (and to some extent > Shrödinger, Turing, von Neumann, etc.) were trying to do is suss out the > difference between living and inanimate systems. And that's worthy. You > don't really need the "agent" concept for that work, though. I tend to > prefer the word "actor". But that's polluted, too. > > And you can't really write it off merely as a crude computational > convenience, either. The core idea (taken up by Penrose and the > proofs-as-programs people, too!) is to settle the question of whether biology > is doing something super-mechanical or non-mechanical ... at least > non-algorithmic, if not non-computational. It's not _all_ nonsense, though a > lot of it is. > > >> On 05/25/2017 04:40 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: >> I am surprised by the suggestion that a crude computational convenience >> (agents) would really have any one-to-one mapping with real things. Since >> we are not talking about biological neural systems nor artifacts from them, >> what sort of physical system would need to decouple symbols from their >> physical implementation? It seems like nonsense by construction and a >> violation of parsimony. > > -- > ☣ glen > > ============================================================ > 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-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove ============================================================ 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-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
