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Article 2223 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: daryl@oracorp.com
Subject: Re: Causes and Reasons
Message-ID: <1991Dec18.114043.12753@oracorp.com>
Organization: ORA Corporation
Date: Wed, 18 Dec 1991 11:40:43 GMT

> 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.

I don't understand what you are driving at here. Are you saying that a
program can't be correctly implemented without some conscious agent's
intervention? Isn't that what a compiler is supposed to do?

Anyway, a program is a mathematical description of a class of
machines. When someone says that the program has this or that
property, they are only talking about the correct implementations: to
say that I is an incorrect implementation of program P is to say that
I is *not* an implementation of P.

You are drifting away from Chalmer's original point: the meaning of a
program is a machine with certain causal properties; properties of the
form "inputing a 5 will cause the output of 25", or whatever. An
implementation of this program will have this causal property by
virtue of what it *means* to be an implementation.

Daryl McCullough
ORA Corp.
Ithaca, NY





