In real life programming projects, if a program gets too big, and programmers cannot verify what the bugs are, then you divide it into little subroutines.
You keep testing on the small piece of the divided subroutines adding them into bigger subroutines and for the whole program for the final testing. “Divide and conquer!” was a tool for the trade. Remember? 
I see the thing-ness of every single thing as impliticlity temporal. A thing “always already makes sense” in terms of time. A thing as such has “temporal depth.” A thing is the “identity” that gathers difference. The thing shows itself now in a specific or determined way only be excluding other specific or determined ways of showing itself.
Identity is temporal synthesis and also interpersonal synthesis, but we enact a faith that our signs ( which are things) are there for others.
A sign is a thing in the world. So signs that point at what all things have in common are indeed — in that sense — self-referential.
As I said above, we don’t “explain” a structure this deep. We only point, and we can only point by enacting the very enacted structure that is being pointed out.
I don’t think you quite get what I am saying.
For me at least, that paper I shared is an attempt to point at “the most basic structure” of the world. The theory is barbarically simple and in that sense beautifully complete.
It’s relevant to this thread because it points at what all mathematics takes for granted, the iterable symbol. Different marks are treated as “the same.” In “real life.” In the qualitative practical world.
In that sense, it is intensely “anti-mystical” in the sense of “absolutely empirical” — no “pure meaning Heaven stuff.”
Personally I would not talk of “three laws.” I would also leave out the theology. But I respect your freedom to go down a different path.
For me a “seeing of this structure” does not imply anything religious or political. I am frankly suspicious of all of that. It makes the pointing look like mysticism or theology.
As a “phenomenologist,” I do not concern myself with grand metaphysical narratives —except to circumvent them. I of course respect the freedom of others to do so.
I think you are missing something crucial here.
In case it helps:
Of course if it halts for us then it doesn’t loop forever.
Also, if we can see that it is looping forever, then this is seeing that it doesn’t halt.
I think everyone agrees on this much.
The problem is that we have no method for deciding difficult cases.
Maybe think of it this way. I give you 5 trillion lines of machine code. Let’s assume only that this code takes a single integer as an input. There is no limit on the size of this integer in the case of a Turing machine. That is all you know about this program. It is 5 trillion lines of machine code (machine instructions) and —if it does give output — gives a single bit back.
Now I ask you: what will this machine do when you start it with the input
1023098223423425345464564564564564564568868678
If you are very very lucky, you might be able to find enough structure to see what it will do without having to wait around and just watch it. But for the most part you just have to run the machine.
Let’s say you do this. You run this program on a giant computer in your basement. You check every day to see if there is output.
After seven years, you are still waiting. Should you keep waiting ?
That gives you a sense of the issue.
The halting problem is a problem about the existence of a decision procedure for a formally defined relation. Turning it into a problem about temporal experience is not an analysis of the halting problem; it is a change of subject. What is the logical status of the proposition “P halts”? is a very different question to What does it mean for an organism to experience a process as continuing through time? The halting problem is not a problem about temporal experience, becoming, or the passage of time at all.
Before asking what the halting problem tells us about time, show that the halting problem tells us anything about time at all.
A compelling discourse is insufficient. Now dissect it. What exactly is being said, what do the terms mean, what follows from each claim, what would count against it; and which of the claims here are you prepared to abandon when the pieces don’t fit.
Phenomenology describes the structure of experience, but is philosophically hazardous when it treats the structure of experience as a guide to the structure of what is experienced.
To me this is a pretty wild claim, tacitly but intensely platonistic. Meaning is not use-in-time but something “outside” of mere use.
Does a rule-governed process stop or not ?
This…has nothing to do with time ?
Is there a rule-governed process that always stops available to tell us if a rule-governed process always stops ? Or, phrased differently, does this talk even make sense ?
It doesn’t seem to make sense.
Yes, a pro-cedure. A “manner of proceeding.” And pro-ceeding is “forward to go.” So — no surprise — we get a machine that “steps” through time discretely, just as a human following exact instructions might.
A “platonist” says \approx “really everything already happened.”
But we mortals in the time-matrix have not yet the thirdeye to see it.
Phenomenology is sometimes understood — initially and badly — in dualist terms, as an investigation of “inside stuff.” It is an investigation of how the world shows itself to us. I mean how the world itself as there. How is math there ? Can we be honest with ourselves about how math is there ?
The hard part is “destructive” — looking around, for instance, the dualist prejudice that there is a “picture” there instead of the world itself.
“Does a rule-governed process stop or not?” is not the halting problem. The halting problem asks whether there is a uniform rule-governed procedure for deciding that question for every program/input pair. The theorem doesn’t say: We cannot know whether arbitrary programs halt because we haven’t waited long enough. It says: There is no algorithm which, for every program and input, produces the correct halting answer.
The methodological problem with a phenomenological or discursive method is not merely that it describes rather than analyses. In this case it has imported problems of our temporal encounters into a problem whose formal content contains no such properties.
As a phenomenologist, you have to make all sorts of metaphysical assumptions.
Even bracketing metaphysics, you still need to assume some structure for the description to work. For example, to describe a phenomenon, you must assume it’s identifiable as itself, like the law of identity. And you also need to assume it can be distinguished from something else, which is the excluded middle. So, the question is, what allows you to bracket anything at all? You can’t even begin without some logical scaffolding.
To impose your will in order to prejudge how you choose to interpret is to take a profound and ultimate metaphysical posture. Hard to get more grandiose than ‘believing’ YOU are the measure of all things.
Its rather striking that in the intention to leave out theology, you’ve stepped right into Genesis 3. “You shall become as God, knowing…”
We’ve both admitted we do not have the omniscience represented by ‘the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’. But the autonomy seized in deciding to be the subjective judge of reality is to seize objective control.
Thats kinda why its historically held as a bad idea, especially when the means of that autonomy is based in touch, taste, sight, and empirical data. The epistemological lesson is the deception (contradiction) that is known today as naive empiricism.
Free to eat of it, but I strongly recommend giving a 2nd opinion a fair hearing.
As a phenomenologist, you discover that you are prejudice, that subjectivity is prejudice. A small portion of this prejudice can be foreground and adjusted. Prejudice is not “bad” or “good.” What I mean by the word here is specificity of a point of view. To look at things one way is to not look at them another way. To look at them in no way at all is for them to not be there at all.
I use “metaphysics” for “mouth belief” that is disconnected from “leg belief.” One of the prejudices that phenomenology foregrounds and adjusts is the prejudice that philosophy is “cosmic word math” about “trans-empirical entities.” Another prejudice is that words are “cream-filled” with “pure meaning” that somehow “mirrors” a trans-empirical “true reality.”
The critique of metaphysics is not offered metaphysically — within the alienated game of mouth-belief “higher physics.”
It is not offered as “mathemagically derived theorem” that “true-reality mathemagical theorems” do not exist in “true-external-sacred reality.” It is not a mirroring of mirroring as failing to mirror a “true reality” of how words work.
This pointing pragmatic positivism tries to point out a prejudicial comportment so that it becomes optional rather than compulsive. It’s one path through the woods among many others, one prejudicial revelation of our situation among many others.
It speaks from a sense of the leg-belief it points at. That’s it. Most will ignore it. That’s OK.
I’m a little surprised. In a crucial way our views overlap. That paper I shared emphasizes that the structure of the thing as such is about as “rock bottom” as we can hope for. So to some degree you are only echoing what I say myself. But you don’t stop where I do.
Your attachment to the metaphor of “law” and the religious subtext makes me think that this is a religious issue for you. I don’t object to your religious beliefs at all, as yours, but I’m not personally interested in metaphysical proofs of God’s existence.
You’re using all three laws in order to say anything, so the Transcendental is not optional. You’re also multiplying entities without necessity. All the ‘signs’ and ‘descriptors’ are just fig leaves. I suppose if they enable you to see it that way, then they serve your purpose.
Quite the reverse. I merely helplessly point at what I can only hope that others can find in even their mundane experience.
My blind vision is that all vision is ( also ) blindness, that all revelation of the object is partial and prejudiced. I accept mortality. I accept that I cannot “fit all of reality” in a personality that is only specific by excluding most of reality.
Are you basically trying to “prove God” to me ? If so, just admit it please.
I have never came across Turing Machine program, so I can only speak from working with modern computer programs.
In programming, the user or programmer is also part of the system.
If program loops forever, you manually intervene in 1-2 minutes, either by pressing Control+Alt+Del or powering OFF and back on.
You don’t sit there and wait for 7 years while program is looping seeing what will happen with the program even with the giant big program.
TM prog seems too simple to be worried about. As said, you know all the possible outcomes from the program run.
I still feel, the truth is your intuition as the probability, but you refuse to see it saying it is too difficult to decide.
You try to write program as simple as you can for the task. 5 trillion lines of code for accepting 1 input to produce 1 output sounds like too impractical and unrealistic in extremity.
Every program you write should have clear point what INPUT and OUTPUT will be, and what it will do.
You don’t go and write 5 trillion lines of code without knowing anything about it, and wait for 7 years for the output. That sounds just not very clever or making sense at all.
How can you see that everything is blindness, if that view is itself blind?
One doesn’t need to be ‘all seeing’ in order to ‘know’ that such a contradiction is false. I can’t prove my own existence, but if I deny it, I affirm it at the same time.
I don’t ultimately ‘know’ that 1 and 1 make 2. I believe it as ‘real sight’ because I can identify, distinguish, and exclude each numeral and thereby understand their relationships.
There seems to be a misunderstanding about the ‘absoluteness’ of the 3 LAWS. They don’t determine everything, but create a stable reality in which true freedom is possible.
I can for instance make subjective choices about a vast number of things. But that is only possible because ‘subjectivity’ can be identified as distinct from objectivity. Without the 3 laws, my freedom would have no ontological status. Freedom would be indistinguishable from chaos.
As to your other question, there are no proofs. So proving God is never my bag. Its strictly unnecessary. We each ALREADY believe in ultimate reality (God). We just don’t each agree on gow to describe it.
The tell, is that by describing it, we make ultimate truth claims that can be tested for coherence. Your ultimate truth claims fail the coherence test of thd laws. Whether you are willing to ‘see that’ is tour free choice, not mine. I can’t PROVE anything.
I said vision is always also blindness. “Vision is always also blindness” is a vision that is also blindness.
I claim no authority over others. I do not pretend to keep God’s logic. I offer signs for how things are from over here.
I don’t believe that marks and sounds “mirror” a “hidden reality.” Yet the simplest thing in ordinary life is there by also hiding, because vision is also blindness.
I agree that we enact a meat-deep belief in the reality of the shared (ur-)empirical world. I use “ur-empirical” to try to talk around the theoretical vanities of floating-mouth-belief.
It is because I believe that the world is there for other people that I say that “all vision is also blindness.”
To see the object from here as me now is to not-see it as you there then. Specification is exclusion. Yet all this qualitative specificity is unified. Identity is the synthesis of ( exclusive ) determinate “quality.”
I think it suffices to speak of identity as the unity of difference. Specificity is implicitly exclusive.
Identity is the temporal and interpersonal synthesis of qualitative difference.
As “profound” as this sounds, it describes the being of the lowly numeral. It describes Saussure’s “acoustic image.”
I read Plato’s “rose-o-teric” doctrine as the general version. I read Heraclitus to say the same, along with Heidegger.
I think (?) you don’t yet have a big picture grasp of the primay issue.
Let me try to make it super-concrete.
Do you think a program with 10,000 lines of code could scan much larger programs and say what they will do ?
Can a particular 10,000 line program tell me what any 1 Billion line program will do ? I feed the code of the big program to the little program. The little program tells me if the big program is “good” or not.
If we had a “God program” that could tell us what any other program would do, then this “God program” would have a finite size.
It would somehow have to be able to understand programs that are ten million times larger than itself, and so on, to “infinity.”
But you are not being practical or realistic in your statement. No one writes codes of billions of lines alone, or tries to debug large programs like that oneself.
For large project over 10.000 line of code, you would work with other programmers making a team, and divide the whole program into the smaller parts allocating to each programmers writing smaller, less complicated but functional code subroutines, which could be easier to debug for errors.
But now in the era of AIs coding for programs, perhaps they can write large amount of codes with ease, and able to debug too. But humans cannot cope with the complexity of billions of codes in programs.