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Article 2192 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Causes and Reasons
Message-ID: <1991Dec17.104834.6690@husc3.harvard.edu>
Date: 17 Dec 91 15:48:32 GMT
References: <1991Dec16.080242.27055@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> 
 <1991Dec16.082402.6631@husc3.harvard.edu> <1991Dec17.033923.29181@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Organization: Dept. of Math, Harvard Univ.
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In article <1991Dec17.033923.29181@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> 
chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:

>In article <1991Dec16.082402.6631@husc3.harvard.edu> 
>zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes:

MZ:
>>No: assuming supervenience, if you get the brain-state right, and you'll
>>get some mental state right.  However, without type-identity, you can't
>>have a nomological regularity between the two, and so would be unable to
>>program the latter.  In other words, if the calculation of 7 + 5 = 12 is
>>realized at the mental level, you won't succeed in programming it.

DC:
>Assuming supervenience: to "program" a calculation of 7+5=12, you
>simply find the relevant states in the supervenience base of a given
>instance of that calculation, and duplicate them.  Anomalism is
>irrelevant here.  I suggest going back and reading Davidson more
>carefully.

The fact that Davidson introduced this notion into modern philosophical
discourse doesn't relieve you from the responsibility to understand its
meaning before you take your ability to drop his name as a license to start
blathering about it.  This is a perfect example of ignorant posturing you
are so enamored of.  In principle and by definition, an anomalous
connection will give you no regular, rule-determinable regularity (`nomos'
is Greek for law or convention) between brain-states and mental states; and
the lack of such regularity will prevent you from circumscribing "the
supervenience base" of *any* given instance of a calculation.

MZ:
>>Implementation is indeterminate in every meaningful sense of the term.  A
>>paper shredder can be said to implement a program by accepting a listing
>>thereof;

DC:
>If you think this is the case, then you do not understand the notion
>of implementation.

Perhaps my example is too extreme; think of the bad cook.  My point is that
correct implementation is indeterminable by purely formal means in the same
way as correct interpretation.  For this reason it makes no sense to claim
that a program possesses any given property assumed to be possessed by its
correct implementation.  The burden of ensuring any property of the latter
falls on the agent in charge of making it correct in the first place, and
not just on the program itself.

>-- 
>Dave Chalmers                            (dave@cogsci.indiana.edu)      
>Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University.
>"It is not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable."


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