Putnam's Rocks Are Clocks

Background

This paper contains my analysis of the realization theorem by Putnam (1988), which is in the Appendix to "Representation and Reality". The theorem proves that everything has every functional organization. At first sight, I thought that this could not be true, and then it seemed to me that something in the proof should be wrong. As I did not like Chalmer's (1996) solution, I investigated it by myself.

It was a forerunner for The Intention of Intention.

Abstract

Putnam proved that "every ordinary open system is a realization of every abstract finite automaton", showing that computing is meaningless. Analyzing a simpler version of his proof, we conclude that giving a meaning to a computation requires computing, which is meaningless, starting a recursion.

References

Link to the page of my analysis of Putnam's realization theorem in figshare, and direct link to the pdf file.

These are the external references used in this page:

Chalmers (1996): "Does a Rock Implement Every Finite-State Automaton?"; doi: 10.1007/BF00413692.
Putnam (1988): "Representation and Reality", isbn: 978-0-262-66074-7.

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Última actualización: 2022-01-07.