From: posting-system@google.com Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2001 9:31 AM To: brian@holtz.org Subject: Re: Hawking, Penrose: Our universe, highly unlikely. From: brian@holtz.org (Brian Holtz) Newsgroups: alt.atheism.moderated Subject: Re: Hawking, Penrose: Our universe, highly unlikely. References: <200111180555.VAA21735@lsil.com> <3474f5fc.0111280237.52e37a90@posting.google.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 12.236.1.8 Message-ID: <29c16047.0112130931.344d980c@posting.google.com> (India) wrote: > [Paul] clearly did not mean to be disingenous, since he > honestly didn't think the Turing-machine-vs-non-Turing-machine issue > was important As I've tried to make clear, the issue isn't that Turing machines are such an obviously great computational substrate. The issue is that of all the Turing-equivalent computational substrates, Life is a misleading one because it "just so happens to also support a menagerie of subsystems that people talk about in pseudobiological terms." > Since Paul later offered a > second explanation (the book), his charge became moot. I asked "perhaps you are retracting your apparent statement that your original claim did not rely merely on the theoretical possibility of artificial life in a Turing Machine". Paul replied "I'm not retracting anything". > nothing less than a direct statement from Brian of > "I do not now believe Paul was being disingenuous" will > assuage him. I never said Paul was disingenuous. I said that "it seems disingenous" to say what he said. "Paul Filseth" wrote in message news:200112071728.JAA14190@lsil.com... > "Brian Holtz" wrote: > > I posted an explanation of my Aug 14 charge ("it seems disingenuous...") > > on Sep 3 and re-posted it on Nov 1, both times without response. > > To set the record straight, I responded to your "explanation" both > times. See my posts of Sep. 12 and Nov. 11. The record clearly shows that neither of these postings responds to the (re-posted) paragraph of explanation, and in particular its penultimate sentence. That sentence is paraphrased with a partial quote at the top of this article, so it has now been posted three times (and pointed to a fourth). > even if your argument about what I ought to > have picked as my poster child were perfectly correct, the worst thing > you'd have had reason to infer from it is that I'd made a reasoning > error. It is not impossible for a reasoning error to *appear* to be an instance of disingenuousness, especially when made by someone who has had (at least until recently ;-) the best track record of reasoning here on a.a.m. But if it will make you feel any better -- and will also spare me from further charges of "nasty" and "unacceptable" behavior --, I will from now on first question your reasoning skills before questioning your motives. :-) I note that elsewhere in your article you accuse me of using a "red herring", by which I understand you to imply that I intentionally ignored a more obvious interpretation of what you had said in order to argue against a (flimsier) misinterpretation. I assure you I had absolutely no such intention, and were I a more sensitive soul I might bitterly resent your implication of such an intention. :-) I might even call it "nasty" and "unacceptable". :-) -- brian@holtz.org http://humanknowledge.net