The purpose of the Society for Machines and Mentality is to advance philosophical understanding of issues involving artificial intelligence, philosophy, and cognitive science.
The purpose of the Society for Machines and Mentality is to advance philosophical understanding of issues involving artificial intelligence, philosophy, and cognitive science.
The 2005 Annual Meeting will be held on Wednesday, December 28, 2005, from 5:15 to 7:15 pm in New York City, New York, USA.
The meeting is held in conjunction with the 2005 Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association. The location is the Hilton New York. Our meeting is Group Session GV-7 and will convene in Concourse G.
The topic for the 2005 meeting is Classical Computation and Hypercomputation. Two papers will be presented.
The Physical Church-Turing Thesis: Modest or Bold?
(University of Missouri–Saint Louis)
Abstract: The Church-Turing thesis (CT) may be stated as the thesis that the functions that are computable in the intuitive sense are computable by Turing Machines (TMs). To put it in Alan Turing's terms, CT pertains to functions that may be “naturally regarded as computable” (Turing 1936-7, p. 135). This formulation of CT should be uncontroversial. Unfortunately, here as elsewhere, people disagree on what is ‘intuitive’ or ‘natural’. As soon as we try to be more precise about the intuitive sense in which functions are computable, agreement ends. There is no consensus on how to discuss CT productively, and many pertinent issues remain unclear. This paper calls for more action on how to properly understand and evaluate CT and offers some suggestions on how progress might be possible.
On the Computational Power of Accelerating Turing Machines
(Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Abstract: An accelerating Turing machine, as the name suggests, is a Turing machine that performs its tasks in an accelerated fashion. For example, it completes the first operation in one moment, the second in 1/2 of a moment, the third in 1/4 of a moment, and so on. As such, it can perform supertasks, namely, complete infinitely many computation steps in a finite span of time. It has been recently argued that, by performing supertasks, accelerating Turing machines can compute functions, such as the halting function, that no standard, “non-accelerating”, Turing machine can handle. I suggest, to the contrary, that a careful analysis of their computational structure reveals that accelerating Turing machines have the same computational power as the non-accelerating machines, and that none solves the halting problem.
The meeting will be chaired by Jack Copeland (University of Canterbury–New Zealand). He will deliver “Comments from the Chair: Hypercomputation and the Church-Turing Thesis”.
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