“There is nothing physical in common with these two activities, but surely they have something in common.”
Having something in common is an easy hurdle. Pen and pencil is vastly more prone to error. You have to remember that when you conceptualize the similarities that doesn’t mean the reality matches your conception. You might thing the counting of apples maps nicely onto the integers but it doesn’t. Not for very large numbers. A pile of three apples maps nicely to the number three, but a pile of 1x10^34 apples would collapse into a black hole.
“You don’t have to consider this mysterious if you don’t want to. But it suggests to me that the reductionist way of looking at the world is, if not wrong, not that useful.”
Reductionism properly understood is but one tool in a toolkit, and one that has an extremely successful track record.
My position on this is very close to Dawkins.
“Reductionism is one of those words that makes me want to reach for my revolver. It means nothing. Or rather it means a whole lot of different things, but the only thing anybody knows about it is that it’s bad, you’re supposed to disapprove of it. (Dawkins)”
Remember we are talking here about your sentence:
“Nonetheless, it is mysterious how physical systems with nothing physical in common can realize the same algorithm.”
Why classify as “reductionist” my ability to directly understand what you find mysterious. I’ve got a degree in Computer Science so I damn well better understand why the same algorithms can run on different physical systems. In fact part of my job is designing such algorithms so they can run on physically different systems. An IBM mainframe, a Mac, and an Intel box are completely different physical systems even if you don’t recognize that fact.
I also fully understand how pen and paper calculations and those done by a calculator or computer map onto each other. Thirty years ago computer time was far more valuable and access to time on computers was much less available. I had to actually write machine code with actual ones and zeros, and then hand simulate the running of those particular bytes on a computer. I did a respectable enough job to find bugs before I got shared time on the computer to actually run it. I understand precisely the mapping and why it works. Hell, I understand the electronics behind it.
Mtraven,
“There is nothing physical in common with these two activities, but surely they have something in common.”
Having something in common is an easy hurdle. Pen and pencil is vastly more prone to error. You have to remember that when you conceptualize the similarities that doesn’t mean the reality matches your conception. You might thing the counting of apples maps nicely onto the integers but it doesn’t. Not for very large numbers. A pile of three apples maps nicely to the number three, but a pile of 1x10^34 apples would collapse into a black hole.
“You don’t have to consider this mysterious if you don’t want to. But it suggests to me that the reductionist way of looking at the world is, if not wrong, not that useful.” Reductionism properly understood is but one tool in a toolkit, and one that has an extremely successful track record.
My position on this is very close to Dawkins.
Remember we are talking here about your sentence: “Nonetheless, it is mysterious how physical systems with nothing physical in common can realize the same algorithm.”
Why classify as “reductionist” my ability to directly understand what you find mysterious. I’ve got a degree in Computer Science so I damn well better understand why the same algorithms can run on different physical systems. In fact part of my job is designing such algorithms so they can run on physically different systems. An IBM mainframe, a Mac, and an Intel box are completely different physical systems even if you don’t recognize that fact.
I also fully understand how pen and paper calculations and those done by a calculator or computer map onto each other. Thirty years ago computer time was far more valuable and access to time on computers was much less available. I had to actually write machine code with actual ones and zeros, and then hand simulate the running of those particular bytes on a computer. I did a respectable enough job to find bugs before I got shared time on the computer to actually run it. I understand precisely the mapping and why it works. Hell, I understand the electronics behind it.
The mystery evaporates with understanding.