Oh!  And I forgot to mention my other favorite *vein* of possible counter 
examples: Hewitt's "Inconsistency Robustness".  I particularly like John Woods' 
contribution to attempts to formalize abduction.

On 10/24/18 2:49 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> My opinion is probably the least credible.  But here it is anyway.  Rosen's 
> achievement was just like every other theoretician's achievement.  He 
> formulated hypotheses that *may* be testable.  The Mikulecky paper Steve 
> posted states one of them fairly well:
> 
> Mikulecky wrote:
>> The functional component itself is totally dependent on the context of the 
>> whole system and has no meaning outside that context. This is why reducing 
>> the system to its material parts loses information irreversibly. This is a 
>> cornerstone to the overall discovery Rosen made. It captures a real 
>> difference between complexity and reductionism which no other approach seems 
>> to have been able to formulate. This distinction makes it impossible to 
>> confuse computer models with complex systems.
> 
> Rosen's formulation of the hypothesis has led to a number of attempts to find 
> a counter example.  And those attempts have been much criticized.  Whatever 
> one's conclusion about those attempts, the hypothesis is clear *enough* to 
> allow those attempts to be in good faith. (E.g. Chu and Ho "A Category 
> Theoretical Argument against the Possibility of Artificial Life".)
> 
> Rosen's is yet another way to formulate (and perhaps formalize, if you 
> believe Louie's work) the strong AI question.  E.g. can human mathematicians 
> do math in ways computers cannot?  Personally, my favorite attempt at a 
> counter example is Feferman's "schematic axiomatic formal systems".  But the 
> same basic hypothesis has resulted in some fun things like Penrose's 
> objective reduction and Homotopy Type Theory's unification theorem.  Does 
> Rosen's formulation do any more work than the others?  Probably not.  But if 
> it's true that science doesn't produce answers, only more questions, then 
> Rosen's work qualifies because it's produced some interesting questions (or 
> ways to ask the same question).  Whether that body of questions is 
> interesting to any particular person is a matter of their taste and history.
> 
> 
> On 10/24/18 2:01 PM, John Kennison wrote:
>> I guess I have missed much of the conversation on this issue. Maybe my 
>> comments are way too late, but I would appreciate it if someone with a more 
>> positive view of Rosen would try to explain what it is that Rosen achieved.
> 
> 

-- 
☣ uǝlƃ

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