Has your friend ever written a quining program? Is his argument also an argument against the existence of such? What does he see as the difference between “understand” and “be capable of fully specifying”?
I suspect that, for anyone who has written (or at least studied in detail) a quining program, and has fully specified a definition of “understand” by which the program either does or does not understand itself, the question will be dissolved, and cease to hold much interest.
In other words, I don’t believe you need to invoke arbitrarily deep recursion to make the argument. I think you just need to specify that the co-brain be a quining computer system, to whatever level of fidelity is required to make you happy.
Has your friend ever written a quining program? Is his argument also an argument against the existence of such? What does he see as the difference between “understand” and “be capable of fully specifying”?
I suspect that, for anyone who has written (or at least studied in detail) a quining program, and has fully specified a definition of “understand” by which the program either does or does not understand itself, the question will be dissolved, and cease to hold much interest.
In other words, I don’t believe you need to invoke arbitrarily deep recursion to make the argument. I think you just need to specify that the co-brain be a quining computer system, to whatever level of fidelity is required to make you happy.
Thanks, this should work!