5HC : Skinner, Turing (fwd)

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 15 Feb 2005, 09:29 · from 2005-February.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: danldo at gmail.com (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)
Date: Tue Feb 15 09:29:39 2005
Subject: (urth) 5HC : Skinner, Turing (fwd)
In-Reply-To: <42115135.5060102 at gmail.com>
References: <BAY102-F182E7B918A75075B06E005B9740 at phx.gbl>
	<42092C7E.9070903 at gmail.com>
	<1f76173705020814335dd7b0c5 at mail.gmail.com>
	<42115135.5060102 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <1f76173705021509293ab9cde5 at mail.gmail.com>

> >>(Ex: Three people are locked in a room. One is stabbed
> >>to death - several wounds. There are only seven possible
> >>answers to the question "whodunit?")
> >>
> >>
> Well, that's assuming quite a number of givens or axioms e g. ' no one else
> coulda got in' 'people cannot commit suicide or help each other murder a
> person' 'stab wounds cannot magically or spontaneously appear- all stab 
> wounds correspond with a stab and vice versa' etc.

I did include suicide as one of my seven options, as well as 
suicide assisted by one or both of the other two. To be precise,
my seven possible answers to "whodunit" were:

1. Suicide by V
2. Murder by A
3. Murder by B
4. A+V
5. A+B
6. B+V
7. A+B+V

I admit that I am taking as axiomatic that being "stabbed to death"
(the given condition was that V was in fact stabbed to death, not just
that V is dead and there are stab wounds on the body) implies that 
someone did the stabbing, By "locked in a room" I intended (by the 
conventions of the locked room mystery) to make it axiomatic that
nobody could get in or out during the period in which the stabbing
took place.

> >I suspect that this is true only of situations where you are faced
> >with countably finite numbers of possible choices...

> Sounds to me like someone has thought up a situations
> in which one is faced with transfinite choices
> Wait, does that even make sense in our universe? 

H'mmm. Good question; assume that time and space are
quantized and there's no situation I can think of in which 
we might have a _genuinely_ transfinite number of 
choices. However, we can have situations which are for
all purposes nonfinite - like the "infinitely variable" speed
control on a power drill, or the analog volume control on a
tube-driven stereo receiver: it must have some quantized
number of states, but those states are closer together than
the limit of our ability to distinguish them, so they are 
indistinguishable from an uncountably infinite set to the
limits of our perceptions.

> One more thing!
> I was reading in my Star Wars collection t'other day, when, en route
> to Boba Fett's story in Tales from Jabba's Palace, to see whether I
> could place anymore of the anecdotes, an excruciating name caught
> my eye. It was remarkably similar to yours.  A relation?

The closest possible relation, me. What are you doing reading 
such trash?

--Dan'l

-- 
"We're going to sit on Scorsese's head"
     -- The Goodfeathers

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net