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Article 2227 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: <1991Dec18.084231.6729@husc3.harvard.edu>
Date: 18 Dec 91 13:42:29 GMT
References: <1991Dec18.114043.12753@oracorp.com>
Organization: Dept. of Math, Harvard Univ.
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In article <1991Dec18.114043.12753@oracorp.com> daryl@oracorp.com writes:

I write:

MZ:
>> 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.

DMC:
>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? 

As I have argued all along, interpretation, like all semantic activity, is
essentially creative.

DMC:
>              Isn't that what a compiler is supposed to do?

The compiler is a program.  Who implements it?

DMC:
>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.

Call it what you will, but correctness of an interpretation is a
non-recursive notion.

DMC:
>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.

Quite so.  However note that, if your process of "inputing a 5 will cause
the output of 25" is construed as a physical activity, then I have argued
that the physical causal powers of a program's implementation are
irreducibly intensional with respect to, and non-emergent from its logical
structure, even when the latter is construed semantically, as interpreted
by a conscious agent.  Which is to say that meaning is a burden that has to
be borne by consciousness.

>Daryl McCullough
>ORA Corp.
>Ithaca, NY


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