Hi Hibbsa,
I put some order on my desktop, and I found a mail from you that I
forgot to answer!
Post by ***@yahoo.com [Fabric-of-Reality],
Post by ***@yahoo.com [Fabric-of-Reality]Post by ***@yahoo.com [Fabric-of-Reality]Post by ***@yahoo.com [Fabric-of-Reality]regarding Ada Lovelace contributions to computing,
David Deutsch tweets https://twitter.com/
https://twitter.com/ https://twitter.com/ https://twitter.com/
me that I was wrong: Babbage never really got universality.
Lovelace totally did."
Hmm... I have a little french book from 1911 by
Jacques Lafitte which gave me indirect evidence
that Babbage did got the "universality" insight
(for >computations). he got it not from his machine(s),
but from the language he invented to describe the
machine, and he realized that such a language is
as powerfull than his machine.
I have evidence that Ada invented programming
and subroutine, but I am not sure she get the
universality I will take a look (when I have more time).
Yes well....having seen the documentary I spent a
little time digging out some details (actually all I did
was visit (the site/blog of) some trusted historians of science).
Apparently all Ada Lovelace did was publish a single
paper, in which she performed a translation to English
of a lecture given by or for Babbage. She added 'poetic
annotations' on what one might do with the analytical
engine. Which was entirely Babbage's' work. Another
point was that not only was it absolute bullshit that
Lovelace inspired or influenced at all the first computer,
but that it's not straight forwarder that the analytical
machine did.
Hi Hibbsa. What you describe is the usual opinion.
But the book by Laffite expalins that when creating a
lnague to describe the plan of he machine, Babbage
eventually realized that the language for the plan
was as much a discovery than its machine, and that
he felt frustrated not being able to communicate that
discovery. It means that he undertood that his language
was a universal machine too, in (a posteriroi) the
mathematical sense which he did not intent to make
precise. Now, I have not seen that language, but I am
open to the idea that Babbage got the "tilt" of the "Turing
universality". About ADA, my reading is that she invented
the notion of subroutine, and the practice of programming,
which demands also some intuiotion of that universality.
With Babbage feeling about its language, the discovery is
made more explicit.
Today we know that some diophantine polynomial relation
are Turing universal. Universality grows >up at the very
elementary part of the arithmetical reality.
Hi Bruno, hope you're well,
Sure, on the face of it there's some compelling elements
there. It's also significant - from my perspective - that
Deutsch says he found it convincing. Because I know how
much thinking he does about universality.
Just to clarify, because it isn't clear whether that last
post from me was expressing my own view or the view of some
historians. Actually I was just paraphrasing the views I read.
But...I do think historians have a lot to input into this sort
of thing.
The big question is really whether there is actual causality
in the flow of certain historical events. No one would likely
doubt that Lovelace anticipated aspects of computing. But the
question of whether she changed the line of history is more involved.
The difference is just that any number of people can be said
in hindsight to have anticipated. That number is really directly
proportional to the detail of history that one is aware. Whereas
to be in the line of causality is much more constrained. So a much
higher accolade.
Hi Hibbsa,
What is interesting is that Gödel missed Church's thesis,
and disbelieve it until reading Turing's paper.
Church itself did not really grasp it as much as people
like Emil Post, or Stephen Kleene, or the philosopher
Judson Webb, who wrote a book showing how the classical
machine already defeat Lucas-Pensore type of argument.
Your earlier very interesting reply to David Deutsch touched on
this matter. It's a period and subject into which I am lately
more curious. For example, I know that Einstein spent a lot of
his time while visiting, walking about with Godel. Naively I
do wonder what they were talking about, and given it was over
that period Einstein was struggling with 'spooky action at a
distance', whether he was playing around with 'incompleteness'
and 'uncertainty' with a view to a possible relation.
According to Palle Yourgrau, even Gödel was nervous about the idea
that "incompleteness" was related to uncertainty.
As I said, Gödel (and Einstein) missed the Mechanist hypothesis
implication, especially with respect to the "mind-body" problem. But
the first person indeterminacy do introduce a relation between them,
indeed, it reduces the whole physics into a probability calculus on
the computations (already emulated by the arithmetical reality). They
key to see this formally is that Gödel's provability predicate []p
does not entail the consistency of p (~[]~p, that is <>p), so we can
define a new modality by []p & <>t, and this one does act like a
probability, even a sort of quantum probability.
It looks like both Einstein and Gödel censored themselves on some
questions.
In the same book (Palle Yourgrau: "a world without time, the forgotten
legacy of Einstein and Gödel, Allen Lane book/Penguin 2005") I learned
that eventually Einstein recognize that we copuld study mathematics
with motivation on fundamental matter (before, Gödel was a
"conventionalist" in mathematics; he took mathematics as a language
only).
Post by ***@yahoo.com [Fabric-of-Reality]And if
he was, does that mean he was actually looking for an abstract
"meta" explanation. No one else was doing that...no one else went
there at that time, I don't think. Whatta guy :O)
I'd like to be able to say something directly relevant to your
point, but I'm out of my depth for now, I'm afraid.
No problem. It is a complex subject, and today, we still remain in the
Aristotelian theological paradigm. Most people still believe (or
worse: take for granted) a primary physical universe, which is the
second God of Aristotle, and I have shown it to be incompatible with
Mechanism (and Occam). The main argument is simple. I translated into
arithmetic, which is still simple for the logicians, but seems
difficult for non-logicians).
Post by ***@yahoo.com [Fabric-of-Reality]Post by ***@yahoo.com [Fabric-of-Reality]Deustch seems to believe in a notion of physical universality,
in a stronger sense: the existence of a physical machine able
to emulate all physical systems in polynomial time. To me,
this is an open problem. One type of universal system would
won in the statistics of all computations, and would have
that property. It is quite plausible, but it is still an
open problem to me, or in arithmetic (such problems can
be translated in arithmetic, or in arithmetical terms
(involving possible quite complex set of numbers, like
arithmetical truth). The fact that the observable of the
Turing machine, as I define them, have a natural quantization
in arithmetic is just a promise toward such quantum machine.
Empirically, the evidences are quite strong, no doubt.
I actually don't think physical sciences would have come down
from the trees in the first place had there been a dogmatic
attachment to things as they first appear to be, or not one
that was conscious and deliberate.
I say sometimes that Aristotelian physics is born with the apparition
of life, and was put in doubt by Plato, and then came back with
Aristotle and did not leave us until now. It is normal, evolution is
short term based, and to survive it is important to not doubt about
the preys and the predators. Platonism needs a bit of luxury and
leisure.
Post by ***@yahoo.com [Fabric-of-Reality]The unconscious 'bias' type flavour is legitimate and should
more attention and/or a better standard of attention IMHO. But
attributing that sort of thing to individuals is not something
that I would personally want to do. It's also a little
self-defeating because doing so presumably entails giving oneself
a clean bill of health on those same terms, to be fit to examine
others without fear of personal bias.
Plato's main understanding is that the fundamental reality was counter-
intuitive. Aristotle, but also the intuitionist later, or those
physicists who believe in a primary Time, resist that idea and try to
save Aristotle's view, but in the long run, I think we will understand
that Plato is correct. In fact Gödel show that machines already get
that point, except that he did not see the formal theory as machine-
subject, but as human theories. he was a semantical platonist, but not
so much realist about the theories/machines, despite he was the first
to study them (meta)-mathematically.
Best,
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/