LESSWRONG
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Beyond the Reach of God
Passing_Through00

Why the hangup about turing-completeness?

In a finite universe world there are no true turing machines, as there are no infinite tapes; thus if you are going to be assigning some philosophical heft to turing-completeness you are being a bit sloppy, and should be saying "show me something that provably cannot be computed by a finite state machine of any size".

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Semantic Stopsigns
Passing_Through40

Eliezer: partway through your essay you make the claim that when someone hits their semantic stopsign (eg, starts to say "God" or "Liberal Democracy", full-stop), that their statement at that point is better classified as a statement of tribal membership (or, perhaps, a tribal ritual to ward off discomfort?) than as an actual semantic statement addressing the question at hand.

Or, rephrased, if I ask "from whence came those physical laws" and you say "from God!", then under this theory the fairest re-statement of the ... (read more)

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0pnrjulius
Well, hopefully not ALL our statements amount to tribal membership... then we couldn't even assert that our statements amount to tribal membership, now could we? And clearly some of the things you might ask along the chain are normal, unproblematic questions, like "Why is there a dog in the yard?" and "Will it rain tomorrow?"; so I don't think it's a big stretch to presume that our discourse is properly semantic until we're given reason to think otherwise. (Truth be told, I'm dubious of non-cognitivism in general; obviously it does work in your ATM example, and maybe even in the "God did it" example... but lots of people try to apply it to things where there really is an obvious propositional interpretation.)
0[anonymous]
You didn't need to phrase all that as a question; it makes a nicely plausible thesis when plainly stated.