On Nov 14, 2008, at 11:22 AM, Brent Meeker wrote:
> For a non-materialist it seems that an un-implemented
> idea or program is an incoherent concept. So for the non-materialist
> there can be no such distinction as "implemented" or "not
> implemented".
I can't answer for Bruno, but in my formulation, I would say that we
can talk about "un-implemented" programs as long as we understand that
we just mean "un-implemented in our particular world".
Imagine again the mathematical description of Conway's Life applied to
the binary digits of PI. Somewhere within that description there may
be descriptions of beings who have built their own computers (which
would ultimately be made out of "gliders" and so on). In that mundane
sense, those beings "perform computations" and "implement programs"
within that world. Even if those beings accepted what I'm calling
Mathematical Physicalism, they could still talk about un-implemented
programs, but they'd just mean "unimplemented by us in this particular
world".
The same goes for "existence" and "non-existence". As a Mathematical
Physicalist, I believe that "everything exists" (at least, everything
that's mathematically describable). But it's still convenient to say
things like "Unicorns don't exist", by which I just mean that they
(probably) don't exist in my particular world. (And by "my particular
world", I really mean the cloud of worlds represented by all my
possible future states and all my possible past states. And so on.)
-- Kory
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Received on Fri Nov 14 2008 - 21:05:29 PST