From: Ian Wright (iwright@GMAIL.COM)
Date: Wed Sep 14 2005 - 15:12:23 EDT
I should have also mentioned that Turing developed the idea of the universal Turing machine to address foundational problems in mathematical logic, in particular whether formal logical systems have limitations. Godel's incompleteness theorems and Turing's halting problem essentially answer "yes", and both proofs involve self-reference and feedback. When dialectical materialists, of whatever stripe, argue that dialectics surpasses the limitations of formal logic, they will find support and clarification for that point of view from the work of Turing and Godel etc. The theory of computation, or at least the mathematical strand of it, grew out of a critique of formal logic.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Sep 16 2005 - 00:00:02 EDT