Re: Can the 'Turing Problem' be deflated?

Marshall wrote:
On Apr 2, 1:25 pm, J Jones <jonescard...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
george wrote:
On Mar 31, 6:27 pm, J Jones <jonescard...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
'Halt' is the recognition of
a fulfillment of a command.
WHY do you think YOU get to SAY what "halt" is or means???
WE *ALREADY HAVE DEFINITIONS* FOR ALL OUR TERMS!
You do NOT GET to tell US what "halt" means.
WE TELL YOU what "halt" means.
In any event, a determination of a 'halt' is the recognition of a
fulfillment of a command. Please.

I'm curious: what do you see the purpose of your musings being?
Essentially what I have seen you do repeatedly is tackle difficult
subjects by throwing verbiage at them. No new insight is generated;
no techniques result; no theorems obtain. The words you write don't
even have any particular meaning the way you put them together;
what is the point? Is your expectation that your analysis of the
Halting Problem will lead to faster microprocessors somehow?
More specifically, if you had cancer, would you want a
radiation oncologist who had studied the hard details of the
effects of different protocols on different types of tumors, or
would you prefer one who had consulted someone such as
yourself and thereby been relieved of the standard, misty-eyed
anthropomorphic, Madame-Curie-apologist conception of
radiation in a post-modern context? Which one do you think
would have the better cure rate? Or is my asking about cure
rates hopelessly mechanistic and beside the point?

Don't get me wrong; despite being an engineer, I don't
require of all human activity that it have justifiable mechanical
advantage. For example, I think high-heeled shoes look just
dandy on a lot of women, even though their design runs directly
counter the most immediate point of footware. But even so, I
wouldn't be especially well-disposed towards a shoe designer
who tried to tell doctors how they should think about radiation.


Marshall


This should clarify things. There should be no reason to suggest 'it is not understandable':

1) If we build a machine, such as a computer, that brings us a result when it halts then we can say that when this computer halts it brings us a result.

2) A 'result' is of course a fulfillment or outcome of a command. So a halt is the fulfillment or outcome of a command.

3) Accordingly, "there is no command or outcome associated with our machine if it does not halt."

And that's it.
------
There is an objection which you raised:
The machine might not be capable of bringing us a result to our command - it may carry on.
My counterargument is that the machine may indeed 'carry on' calculating - as we perceive it. However, the calculation is always associated with a halt. It halts at each step, and at each step we can discern the outcome or fulfillment of a command. There can be no outcome or fulfillment of a command in the case of our machine 'not halting'. If the machine does not halt it is idle for a PARTICULAR task.

The last statement may be challenged: we can still say that there is an outcome for that task, a task toward which the computer is interminably working. I can respond by asking how we would recognise the outcome of that task. If we have no means of recognising an outcome for our task then we cannot say that we have made a command.
The objector would then be forced to propose a new element in the scenario - 'a halt is only a halt when the machine does not re-start.' My argument against that is that a machine does not 'restart'. Each start is unique. There is no stepwise 'process' that the machine engages in that can distinguish between a 'previous' and a 'next' step.

That's the argument, and that's the objections tackled. I suggest that mistakes in philosophical 'grammar' or argumentation, or conceptualization CAN be translated and internalized into formal language, where the conciseness of form can veil misconceptions. I don't think ANY logician can argue with that. The best logicians have always built their logics on such preformal studies and investigations. Frege's Foundations of Arithmetic is an excellent read in that regard.
--
.

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