On Thursday, June 30, 2016 at 11:33:58 PM UTC+5:30, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > On Fri, 1 Jul 2016 01:28 am, Rustom Mody wrote: > > > On Thursday, June 30, 2016 at 1:55:18 PM UTC+5:30, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > > > >> you state that Turing "believes in souls" and that he "wishes to > >> put the soul into the machine" -- what do his religious beliefs have to > >> do with his work? > > > > Bizarre question -- becomes more patently ridiculous when put into general > > form "What does what I do have to do with what I believe?" > > Lots of people do things that go against their beliefs, or their beliefs (at > least, their professed beliefs) go against what they do. But I'll ask > again: in what way does Turing's supposed beliefs about souls have anything > to do with his mathematical work? > > Let's be concrete: > > In what way does the Halting Problem depend on the existence (or > non-existence) of the soul?
Lets change your question -- ever so slightly, given the Turing-context: In what way does the Turing Test depend on the existence (or non-existence) of the soul? > > How was his work on breaking German military codes during World War 2 > reliant on these supposed souls? (In the sense of a separate, non-material > spirit, not in the figurative sense that all people are "souls".) When you say "soul" you (seem to?) mean what has been called with justifiable derision, "dualistic notion of soul" - something for which Christianity gets bad press though its the invention of Descartes http://www.iep.utm.edu/descmind/ - something which caught on because of Descartes huge reputation as a scientist There are other more reasonable non-religious non-dualistic notions of soul possible: http://www.bu.edu/agni/poetry/print/2002/56-szymborska.html <snipped stuff on numbers> You are missing the point -- its not about specific numbers its about cardinality not adding up - Cantor theory points to uncountably many real numbers - All the sets upto algebraic are countable - So the uncountable fellas need to be transcendental - We only know two blessed guys -- π and e Where are all the others hiding?? And dont try saying that if e is transcendental so is 2e 3e 4e... And no use trying more such tricks -- they only multiply these two countably infinite times And you may produce a few more, more esoteric transcendentals --- a very finite set! Nor is it much good saying this is not much relevance to our field: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_diagonal_argument So our (computer scientists') predicament in short - our field is opposed to Cantor's non-constructivist *outlook* - At the foundation of CS are *methods* that.... come from Cantor... OOPS! -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
