From: Ian Wright (ian_paul_wright@HOTMAIL.COM)
Date: Thu Nov 20 2003 - 13:30:46 EST
Hello Ajit, Thanks for your response. I'm enjoying the exchange because our ideas are so different. I wanted to completely seperate the relevance of my model as a model of economic reality from its status as an object that is part of reality. The point I was trying to make was that any computational system, for example all the computer programs out there, from payroll software, email delivery agents, web crawlers, programs that manage online discussion lists, such as this one, controllers for autonomous robots, and so forth, are all dynamical systems that operate in real, historical time. (Let's not confuse a computer program running in historical time with a computer program that is designed to model, correctly or incorrectly, the time evolution of another system). I do not think it possible to refute Humean scepticism over a couple of emails, nor do I think I necessarily can, but I'd like to point out that Humean scepticism regarding the causality of computer programs is unjustified because the causality of computer programs is founded on logical, not natural, necessity. Computer programs do what they do in virtue of their logical structure. It is logically impossible for them to act otherwise, and hence an observer trying to induce a theory over the event regularities they generate is justified in doing so, whether they know it or not. An observer that attains a correct theory, in this case the discovery of the logical structure of the program implemented in the material system, is justified in inducing that the mechanism identified will continue to act in this way, for it is logically impossible for the mechanism identified to act otherwise. This is not to deny that computational systems may act unexpectedly due to the vagaries of their implementation in circuits or other structures of matter. But due to the robustness of the implementation when something does go wrong then software engineers typically do not look for errors in the circuitry, or wonder whether a stray photon upset the CPU at the moment of calculation, or check whether a strong mangetic field is affecting the machine. They re-examine the logic of their computer programs because they (tacitly) know that, excluding some essential breakdown of the system, the events that the program generates occur with logical necessity, a kind of necessity that cannot seriously be questioned without questioning the very basis of rationality, which is a condition of possibility of Humean scepticism. The demands of logic dictate that the causality of a computer program be considered objective and real, and in practice this is what happens everyday in businesses worldwide. If this argument is accepted, then at the very least a subset of the natural world is immune from Humean scepticism. A longer argument would claim that it is justified to hypothesise that this particular case is in fact universal, but I don't really want to get into this. But I hope the foregoing provides reasons why I think it very strained to maintain that the casuality of an instantiated, running computer program is a figment of human imagination, irrespective of whether the system was created by humans (or not). I'll return to your particular criticisms of my model of a simple commodity economy in a later post. All the best, -Ian. _________________________________________________________________ MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus
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