On Thu, May 18, 2006 at 11:38:24AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> >
> > Also the universal dovetailer idea is also one of those that is fairly
> > obvious, and might have been discovered a number of times
> > independently.
>
>
> I'm not sure it is so easy, and in the present case I have never heard
> about some other papers.
> Frankly I am not sure you got it right. I guess it is subtle: there is
> a need of some amount in computer science to be astosnished that such a
> thing is logically possible. I will not develop this here because I
> intend to make this clear in my reply (or sequence of replies) to Tom
> and George.
>
I'm not sure why a knowledge of computer science would make the UD
astonishing. If anything, I would have thought the opposite. I'm
interested to read your post to Tom and George.
The notion of dovetailing is really the theory behind timesharing, so
simple dovetailing must be pretty obvious, at least since the early
seventies.
That one can dovetail on all possible programs must be pretty obvious
once one realises that these can be enumerated. Of course the
philosophial consequences of being able to do this is not so obvious,
and as far as I know, you are the first person to have thought about that.
Without the philosophical consequences, one would just think "so
what?" So it is perhaps not surprising noone mentioned the UD before you.
> Then I am showing that the appearances of "persons and realities" are
> due to the incompleteness phenomena. I guess this is also a fairly
> simple idea in the air, but, like the UD, I have not seen it develop
> elsewhere, and it still gives me an hard and long time to make it clear
> as this very list can illustrate. And of course I can also be wrong,
> also. My work mainly consists in making that idea testable (and
> *partially* tested).
>
I sympathise, but I'm still having trouble getting the connection
too. Nevertheless, I find it intriguing.
>
> Bruno
>
>
> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
>
>
>
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Received on Mon May 22 2006 - 22:32:08 PDT