X-Message-Number: 4088
From:  (Thomas Donaldson)
Subject: Re: CryoNet #4023 - #4033
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 1995 16:02:07 -0800 (PST)

To Mr. Clark, once more:

Oh come on! In your original definition of symbol you chose to use events in 
our brain, which you said depended on a "convention". You still haven't
specified where this convention occurs. 

As for DNA being a code, the entire process still works because of the 
particular chemistry of the parts. The fact that some of these parts work on
a variety of substrates does not make their operation symbolic. Some enzymes 
do that too. And incidentally, even in the cases you cite, the choice is NOT
very wide. Many chemicals simply won't work. Once more you start sliding over 
from symbols (which are matters of convention) to physical 
objects, which are not. It is that sliding to which I object.


As for Turing machines, I've never questioned that they could do any 
computationat all. But just how long will they take? And if you really want (as 
your return
to Turing machines makes me think) to be downloaded into a computer that will
take millions of years to do the thinking that we do in a day, well, you're 

welcome. Do what you want. But faster creatures (based on computers or not) will
probably take you apart before you last very long and turn you into something 
else... tricycles, for instance, or clothespins.

And about thinking about the Sun: you must have a really strange notion of how
ANYTHING in the universe works if you think that I would have to have the 

Sun somehow inside me to think about it without using symbols. A lot, of 
course,depends on just what kind of thoughts you mean. A reptile can lie out in 
the Sunand seek to do so without containing the Sun in its brain; so can people.
If you
want me to think mathematically about the Sun, then I would certainly use
symbols ... and probably computers too (remember that I said we could USE
symbols, not that we ALWAYS did). If I come to understand that the Sun
comes up in the morning and goes down at night, then just what symbols may be 
involved becomes difficult. As you know, they thought the same in Ptolemaic
times. And before that. When I awake in the sunlight am I thinking about the
Sun?

We come straight back to my original question. Please give a NONCIRCULAR
definition of symbol. You don't show me that my brain works in symbols by 
simply giving the workings of my brain as an example of use of symbols. Where
was the convention? For that matter, where is the convention in the brain of
the earthworm? So far as it has a brain.

			Long long life,

				Thomas Donaldson


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