What is Turing’s Comparison between Mechanism and Writing Worth?

Lassègue, Jean; Longo, Giuseppe

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-30870-3_46

“…This mode of action is to put in terms of writing: machines allow humans to write, but they also write (Kittler 1995;Hayles 2002). This writing is not textual but computational: for a computer, to write is to compute, and to compute is to write, since they are rooted into formal logic and a specific conception of calculus as a kind of writing (Lassègue et Longo 2012). But this writing does not necessarily produce a human-readable text.…”

Section: Meeting the Machine Halfwaymentioning

confidence: 99%

Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture

Karkulehto¹,

Koistinen²,

Varis³

2019

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The time has come for human cultures to seriously think, to diligently conceptualize, and to earnestly fabulate about all the nonhuman critters we share our world with, and to consider how to strive for more ethical cohabitation. Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture tackles this severe matter within the framework of literary and cultural studies. The emphasis of the inquiry is on the various ways in which actual and fictional nonhumans are reconfigured in contemporary culture -although, as long as the domain of nonhumanity is carved in the negative space of humanity, addressing these issues will inevitably clamor for the reconfiguration of the human as well.

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“…Nevertheless, this does not prevent the TM from being a mechanistic abstraction. In a 1950 paper, Turing defines it as a writing mechanism (Turing, 1950) (more comments on that aspect can be found in (Lassègue and Longo, 2012)). The TM is not a full-blown description mechanism but a mechanistic sketch.…”

Section: The Turing Machine: the Execution Model For Classical Comput...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Computers as Interactive Machines: Can We Build an Explanatory Abstraction?

Martin

¹

,

Magnaudet

²

,

Conversy

³

2023

Minds & Machines

0

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In this paper, we address the question of what current computers are from the point of view of human-computer interaction. In the early days of computing, the Turing machine (TM) has been the cornerstone of the understanding of computers. The TM defines what can be computed and how computation can be carried out. However, in the last decades, computers have evolved and increasingly become interactive systems, reacting in real-time to external events in an ongoing loop. We argue that the TM does not provide a mechanistic explanation for interactive computing. The reason is that the fundamental phenomena relevant to interactive computing are out of the scope of classical computability theory. Part of the explanatory power of the TM relies on what we propose to call an execution model. An execution model belongs to a level of abstraction where it is possible to describe both the functional architecture and the execution in mechanistic terms. An updated execution model is warranted to provide the minimal mechanistic description for interactive computation as a counterpart of what the TM could explain regarding Church-Turing computation. It would support an explanation of the ubiquitous computing devices we know -those interacting with humans, e.g., through digital interfaces. We show that such a model is not available within interactive models of computation and that relevant abstractions and concerns are available in computer engineering but need to be identified and gathered. To fill this void, we propose to reflect on the level of abstractionrequired to support the mechanistic description of an interactive execution and propose some preliminary requirements.

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“…This mode of action is to put in terms of writing: machines allow humans to write, but they also write (Kittler 1995;Hayles 2002). This writing is not textual but computational: for a computer, to write is to compute, and to compute is to write, since they are rooted into formal logic and a specific conception of calculus as a kind of writing (Lassègue et Longo 2012). But this writing does not necessarily produce a human-readable text.…”

Section: Meeting the Machine Halfwaymentioning

confidence: 99%

Reconfiguring human, nonhuman and posthuman in literature and culture

Christiansen

¹

2021

NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research

0

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The time has come for human cultures to seriously think, to diligently conceptualize, and to earnestly fabulate about all the nonhuman critters we share our world with, and to consider how to strive for more ethical cohabitation. Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture tackles this severe matter within the framework of literary and cultural studies. The emphasis of the inquiry is on the various ways in which actual and fictional nonhumans are reconfigured in contemporary culture -although, as long as the domain of nonhumanity is carved in the negative space of humanity, addressing these issues will inevitably clamor for the reconfiguration of the human as well.

show abstract

What is Turing’s Comparison between Mechanism and Writing Worth?

Cited by 10 publications

References 17 publications

Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture

Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture

Computers as Interactive Machines: Can We Build an Explanatory Abstraction?

Reconfiguring human, nonhuman and posthuman in literature and culture

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