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Aren't you confusing language with understanding? In computer terms (which I'm more familiar with) this is the difference between expressing a program in some

Aren't you confusing language with understanding? In computer terms (which I'm more familiar with) this is the difference between expressing a program in some language vs evaluating that program.

sametmax 9y ago
A program that can be evaluated only by the coder who wrote it is kinda useless.
- crawfordcomeaux 9y ago
  Unless you think of programs as having a general structure with specific parts to be filled in by the coder before or during evaluation. This is how we can design a language for communicating general solutions to people's individual internal issues. Like self-help mad libs.
astrodust 9y ago
A Turing machine is a very simple device. Evaluating if something is "Turing complete" is simply determining if it can function like a Turing machine. Compare this with trying to define the "set of all possible concepts". What does that even look like? What is a concept? How can it be expressed? Concepts are a lot more nuanced than bare 1s and 0s because there's subjective meaning applied to them. The complexity here is that concepts are generally recursive, they have intricate links to other concepts, which in turn link to others.
- OscarCunningham 9y ago
  In the same way, "Turing complete" might not mean "capable of doing any possible computation". It could be that there are some computations that can be performed but not by a Turing machine. This is uncertain enough that we call it the Church-Turing Thesis. But it's hard to describe the notion of "every possible computation", so instead we compare things relative to Turning machines. We could do the same thing with languages. Say a language is "English complete" if it can express at least everything expressible in English. I suspect all commonly used modern languages are English complete. The most obvious way I can see that a language would fail to be complete would be if it lacked nonce words or any equivalent device.
  - astrodust 9y ago
    > I suspect all commonly used modern languages are English complete... English is just one language, and while perhaps unusually expressive because of the amount of abuse it's received over the centuries, plus its ability to wholesale absorb new words on a whim, it is incapable of expressing some things with the same degree of succinctness and precision other languages have. There are words in other languages that take a paragraph to explain in English because of all the cultural context they contain, or because they refer to things that most people who speak English have never seen, nor felt a need to describe with that degree of precision. The problem with using English as a basis is it's very hard to explain in English what the language is incapable of expressing. This is like a fish trying to explain what they can do on land when the very concept of land is hazy at best.

Aren't you confusing language with understanding? In computer terms (which I'm more familiar with) this is the difference between expressing a program in some language vs evaluating that program.

sametmax 9y ago

A program that can be evaluated only by the coder who wrote it is kinda useless.

crawfordcomeaux 9y ago
Unless you think of programs as having a general structure with specific parts to be filled in by the coder before or during evaluation. This is how we can design a language for communicating general solutions to people's individual internal issues. Like self-help mad libs.

astrodust 9y ago

A Turing machine is a very simple device. Evaluating if something is "Turing complete" is simply determining if it can function like a Turing machine. Compare this with trying to define the "set of all possible concepts". What does that even look like? What is a concept? How can it be expressed? Concepts are a lot more nuanced than bare 1s and 0s because there's subjective meaning applied to them. The complexity here is that concepts are generally recursive, they have intricate links to other concepts, which in turn link to others.

OscarCunningham 9y ago
In the same way, "Turing complete" might not mean "capable of doing any possible computation". It could be that there are some computations that can be performed but not by a Turing machine. This is uncertain enough that we call it the Church-Turing Thesis. But it's hard to describe the notion of "every possible computation", so instead we compare things relative to Turning machines. We could do the same thing with languages. Say a language is "English complete" if it can express at least everything expressible in English. I suspect all commonly used modern languages are English complete. The most obvious way I can see that a language would fail to be complete would be if it lacked nonce words or any equivalent device.
- astrodust 9y ago
  > I suspect all commonly used modern languages are English complete... English is just one language, and while perhaps unusually expressive because of the amount of abuse it's received over the centuries, plus its ability to wholesale absorb new words on a whim, it is incapable of expressing some things with the same degree of succinctness and precision other languages have. There are words in other languages that take a paragraph to explain in English because of all the cultural context they contain, or because they refer to things that most people who speak English have never seen, nor felt a need to describe with that degree of precision. The problem with using English as a basis is it's very hard to explain in English what the language is incapable of expressing. This is like a fish trying to explain what they can do on land when the very concept of land is hazy at best.