Re: An idea to resolve the 1st Person/3rd person division mystery - Coarse graining is the answer!?

From: Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Thu, 10 May 2007 11:02:21 +0200

Le 09-mai-07, à 18:50, Brent Meeker a écrit :

>
> Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>
>> Le 09-mai-07, à 09:08, marc.geddes.domain.name.hidden a écrit :
>>
>>> Of course reality doesn't change. The question of map versus
>>> territory is *not* an all or nothing
>>> question. *sometimes* the map equals the territory. Most of the
>>> time
>>> it does not.
>>
>>
>> This is an important point where I agree with Marc. With or without
>> comp the necessity of distinguishing the map and the territory cannot
>> be uniform, there are "meaning"-fixed-point, like when a map is
>> embedded continuously in the territory (assuming some topology in the
>> map and in the territory, this follows by a fixed point theorem by
>> Brouwer, which today admits many interesting computational
>> interpretations.
>>
>> Bruno
>
> I don't think you can define a topology on "meaning" that will allow
> the fixed point theorem to apply.



A whole and rather important subfield of computer science is entirely
based on that. It is know as denotational semantics. Most important
contributions by Dana Scott. You can look on the web for "Scott
domains". Or search with the keyword "fixed point semantics topology".
Sometimes the topology is made implicit through the use of partial
order and a notion of continuous function in between. Indeed the
topological space used in this setting are not Hausdorff space, and are
rather different from those used in geometry or analysis.

A nice book is the one by Steve Vickers. It has provide me with
supplementary reason to single out the Sigma_1 sentences as
particularly important in the comp frame. (Topology via Logic,
Cambridge University Press, 1989:
http://www.amazon.ca/Topology-via-Logic-Steven-Vickers/dp/0521576512).

Here are some links:

http://www.ercim.org/publication/Ercim_News/enw50/schellekens.html

http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~slonnegr/plf/Book/Chapter10.pdf

http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/Workshops/Lattices/slides/zhang.pdf

I could say more in case I come back on the combinators. Cf:
http://www.mail-archive.com/everything-list.domain.name.hidden/msg05958.html
because there are strong relation between fixed point semantics, the
paradoxical combinators, and the use of the (foirst and second)
recursion theorem in theoretical computer science. But ok all that
could become very technical of course.

... I thought you knew about fixed point semantics, perhaps I miss your
point ...


Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/


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Received on Thu May 10 2007 - 05:02:45 PDT

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