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Pluralism Ignored: The Church-Turing Thesis and Philosophical Practice

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Book cover Language, Life, Limits (CiE 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 8493))

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Abstract

The Church-Turing thesis is widely stated in terms of three equivalent models of computation (Turing machines, the lambda calculus, and rewrite systems), and it says that the intuitive notion of a computable function is what is defined by any one of these models. Despite this well-established equivalence, the philosophical literature concentrates almost exclusively on the Turing machine model. We argue that this has been to the detriment of the philosophy of computation, and specifically that it ignores two issues: firstly, equivalence in the Church-Turing sense is extensional equivalence, whereas many of the delicate issues in the philosophy of mind, and in theoretical computer science, are to do with fine-grained intensional equivalence of algorithms. Secondly, real computers are not in any meaningful sense Turing machines: they are nondeterministic, their memory may fail to be in a determinate state due to cache coherence issues, and the boundaries between inside and outside are ill-defined and permeable. We explore the philosophical significance of these issues and give some examples.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary, University of London, UK

    G. Graham White

Authors
  1. G. Graham White
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Science, Department of Computer Science, Swansea University, SA2 8PP, Swansea, UK

    Arnold Beckmann

  2. Department of Algorithms and Their Applications, Eötvös Loránd University, Pázmány Péter sétány 1/c,, 1117, Budapest, Hungary

    Erzsébet Csuhaj-Varjú

  3. Computer Science Institute, Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg, Cottbus, Germany

    Klaus Meer

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White, G.G. (2014). Pluralism Ignored: The Church-Turing Thesis and Philosophical Practice. In: Beckmann, A., Csuhaj-Varjú, E., Meer, K. (eds) Language, Life, Limits. CiE 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8493. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08019-2_39

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08019-2_39

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-08018-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-08019-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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