🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct6.165617.26091@oracorp.com> daryl@oracorp.com (Daryl McCullough) writes:
>In article <1992Oct02.202707.126376@Cookie.secapl.com>,
>frank@Cookie.secapl.com (Frank Adams) writes:
>>>I also don't believe that mental states are determined by physical
>>>states. I believe that the relationship between a mental state and the
>>>corresponding physical state to be something like the relationship
>>>between an algorithm and a corresponding implementation, or the
>>>relationship between a theory and its models.
>>
>>Two very different analogies.  I *can* in principle determine the algorithm
>>from the implementation (although there may be cases where I am not smart
>>enough to do so).
>
>I disagree. In implementing an algorithm as a physical system, there
>will be some state variables that will be used as inputs, some that
>will be used as outputs, some that will be used as "scratch paper",
>some that will be used as memory. Still other state variables will be
>completely irrelevant to the algorithm (for example, in most computers
>such things as the temperature of the CPU, which is certainly a state
>variable of the computer as a physical system, is completely
>irrelevant). It is not possible (even in principle) to uniquely
>interpret a physical system as an implementation of an algorithm
>without knowing more about implementation conventions.

From your original post, I did not understand "a corresponding
implementation" to mean *physical* implementation, but instead interpreted
it as "implementation in a programming language".

With my interpretation, this is a mathematical problem, which is not
computable as a class, but any individual problem may be solved with
sufficient ingenuity.  Your problem makes it a scientific problem.  Our
experience with science so far suggests that such problems are, in fact,
solvable.