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My reaction was somewhat similar, and I posted along those lines in the comments to Aaronson's post. As I said there, the question is not about a function f tha
by pdonis 2y ago
My reaction was somewhat similar, and I posted along those lines in the comments to Aaronson's post. As I said there, the question is not about a function f that could call the constant 1 function or the constant 0 function depending on whether God exists. The question is about a label f whose referent will be either the constant 1 function or the constant 0 function, we just don't know which unless we can figure out whether or not God exists. To me the question isn't actually about computability at all (the computability of both of the constant functions is trivial), it's about labels.
- gowld 2y agoThe question is about computability, in the sense it's asking to recognize the possibility of an unknown (trivial) computable function. The "God stuff" is an distraction, with modal-logic ambiguities as another commenter wrote. I just wrote a regular expression (a real one, not PCRE), and then deleted it, and dissolved my computer in acid. It is completely impossible to ever know what I wrote. Was that function computable? Then I got another computer and wrote a program in a Turing Complete language, and deleted and dissolved that computer in acid. Was that program computable?