Posted by
glen ep ropella on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Welcome-Jim-tp526087p526105.html
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G?nther Greindl wrote:
> Of course, you have to be careful when criticising Rosen, as most
> critics are then countered by "that is not how RR uses that and that word".
Yes, I know. [grin] I've been arguing with Rosenites for years and
that is, by far, their most frequent and most relied upon defense.
C'est la vie. Other cliques do the same thing, from physicists to
theologians to mathematicians. I call these people "hermeneuts" ... or,
when I'm feeling punchy, "priests".
> they talk about a Universal Turing Machine (or a
> TM and it's equivalents, whatever you like).
>
> So, when I speak of machine/mechanism I mean the general, computer
> science meaning; also, recursive functions are well defined, no problems
> in this area.
>
> More problematic of course is life: I guess there is no single accepted
> definition of life, people will not even agree on what is alive (virus? etc)
>
> So, maybe Rosen has a personal definition of life, but what I targeted
> was the (M,R)-systems, which he posits as a model of organism which are
> opposed to mechanisms.
>
> And I can't see anything in (M,R)-system (metabolism, repair) which is
> not amenable to a mechanistic solution, the only real difficult part
> being the coding of the replication of the system from within itself -
> and that is where the recursion theorem comes in.
>
> So my argument runs as this: the models Rosen proposes as models of life
> can be modeled by well known mechanistic models. Hence Rosen's claim
> that life is not a mechanism is refuted.
OK. So RR makes a prohibitive claim ... something like "living systems
cannot be accurately modeled with a UTM because MR systems cannot be
realized". And you are refuting that claim by a counter-claim that MR
systems _can_ be realized, emphasizing that the recursion theorem is
crucial to such a realization.
Do I have it right?
- --
glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846,
http://tempusdictum.comIf a man can't piss in his own front yard, he's living too close to
town. -- Tom Russell
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