>From Leibniz.... The world we live in has a curious connection between time and truth in that the only truths we can know in this world of time and space are facts, truths that need not be always true nor true everywhere. Contingent truths.
To me, the halting issue is a characteristic of these time-based contingent truths. It may not always work, you may or may not get a result, and so forth. On the other hand, if I can use the metaphor "above this world", are truths called necessary truths, or truths of logic or reason, which are always true. Such truths can be identified as true or false and are always are such. Roger , rclo...@verizon.net 8/17/2012 Leibniz would say, "If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so everything could function." ----- Receiving the following content ----- From: William R. Buckley Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-08-15, 16:58:05 Subject: RE: Why AI is impossible Letæ¯ not ignore the most important point. The machine has Turing closure solely due to the details of its construction. wrb From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Quentin Anciaux Sent: Wednesday, August 15, 2012 11:25 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Why AI is impossible 2012/8/15 John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 2:16 PM, William R. Buckley <bill.buck...@gmail.com> wrote: > Regardless of your dislike for the term omniscience I don't dislike the term, in fact I think I'd rather enjoy being omniscient but unfortunately I'm not. > the Turing machine can compute all computable computations, Yes, and thus Turing proved that in general determining if a computer program will ever stop is not computable; all you can do is watch it and see what it does. No, all you can know is that no *general* algorithm (as you pointed out) can solve that. And I have to say it again, it doesn't mean that a particular one cannot solve the halting problem for a particular algorithm. And unless you prove that that particular algorithm is undecidable, then it is still possible to find another algorithm that could decide on the halting of that algorithm. If you see it stop then obviously you know that it stopped but if its still going then you know nothing, maybe it will eventually stop and maybe it will not, you need to keep watching and you might need to keep watching forever. It's obviously not true for *a lot* of algorithm.... Quentin John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
