Untitled

Shagrir, Oron

doi:10.1023/a:1015694932257

Cited by 25 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 24 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Etesi and Németi [35] suggest that "effective method" should refer to any method that can be realised in any physical system, whether that system is an idealised human being or not. Shagrir [36] argues that the term "effective method" has undergone a meaning shift: in 1936, it meant a method that was in principle human executable, but today it means any symbolic operation that makes use of a finite procedure, and so it may refer to methods executable by humans, physical systems, or abstract automata. 14 What our words mean is ultimately up to us and, in principle, there is nothing to stop a sufficiently determined revisionist from electing to define or redefine "effective method" so that it includes non-human-executable methods.…”

Section: What Is An Effective Method?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, if looked at in a different way-at a different level of abstraction, or with an emphasis on different features-those same methods might be classified as different. 36 In general, it is not obvious what counts as a "superficial" versus a "genuine" difference between the internal workings of computing methods (e.g., in Shagrir's case it is not obvious that the Game of Life really does require all cells to be updated simultaneously). The question therefore always potentially arises about whether a suggested computational method is genuinely different from an effective method-whether it is a legitimate case of a non-effective computational method-or only one that differs in some superficial respects.…”

Section: Quantum Computations That Are Not Effective Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…15 For further defence of the human-centric condition regarding "effective method", see Black [39]; Button [7]; Copeland [24]; Gandy [29]; Shagrir [40] (p. 40); Smith [41]. 16 See Shagrir [36] (pp. 225-226); Shagrir [40] (pp.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…225-226); Shagrir [40] (pp. [36][37][38][39]. 17 Copeland [25,52] criticises a number of the same authors for committing what he calls the "Church-Turing fallacy".…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hadamard gate is a quantum operator that works in a similar way to Deutsch's √ NOT operator, but defined over the real numbers. The transformation provided by a Hadamard gate is given by the real-valued matrix 1 Hadamard gate may be physically implemented with half-silvered mirrors; see Barz[73].31 See Nielsen and Chuang[69] (pp [32][33][34][35][36]. for the details of the algorithm.For further discussion of this point, see Nielsen and Chuang[69], pp.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Not All Computational Methods Are Effective Methods

Sprevak

2022

Philosophies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

An effective method is a computational method that might, in principle, be executed by a human. In this paper, I argue that there are methods for computing that are not effective methods. The examples I consider are taken primarily from quantum computing, but these are only meant to be illustrative of a much wider class. Quantum inference and quantum parallelism involve steps that might be implemented in multiple physical systems, but cannot be implemented, or at least not at will, by an idealised human. Recognising that not all computational methods are effective methods is important for at least two reasons. First, it is needed to correctly state the results of Turing and other founders of computation theory. Turing is sometimes said to have offered a replacement for the informal notion of an effective method with the formal notion of a Turing machine. I argue that such a view only holds under limited circumstances. Second, not distinguishing between computational methods and effective methods can lead to mistakes when quantifying over the class of all possible computational methods. Such quantification is common in philosophy of mind in the context of thought experiments that explore the limits of computational functionalism. I argue that these ‘homuncular’ thought experiments should not be treated as valid.

show abstract

Section: What Is An Effective Method?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Quantum Computations That Are Not Effective Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…225-226); Shagrir [40] (pp. [36][37][38][39]. 17 Copeland [25,52] criticises a number of the same authors for committing what he calls the "Church-Turing fallacy".…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Not All Computational Methods Are Effective Methods

Sprevak

2022

Philosophies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

What is the Church-Turing Thesis?

Boker¹,

Dershowitz

2022

Axiomatic Thinking II

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Theses for Computation and Recursion on Concrete and Abstract Structures

Feferman

2015

Turing’s Revolution

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The main aim of this article is to examine proposed theses for computation and recursion on concrete and abstract structures. What is generally referred to as Church's Thesis or the Church-Turing Thesis (abbreviated CT here) must be restricted to concrete structures whose objects are finite symbolic configurations of one sort or another. Informal and principled arguments for CT on concrete structures are reviewed. Next, it is argued that proposed generalizations of notions of computation to abstract structures must be considered instead under the general notion of algorithm. However, there is no clear general thesis in sight for that comparable to CT, though there are certain wide classes of algorithms for which plausible theses can be stated. The article concludes with a proposed thesis RT for recursion on abstract structures.

show abstract

Untitled

Cited by 25 publications

References 24 publications

Not All Computational Methods Are Effective Methods

Not All Computational Methods Are Effective Methods

What is the Church-Turing Thesis?

Theses for Computation and Recursion on Concrete and Abstract Structures

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About