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Falsifiability and Gandy’s variant of the Church-Turing thesis
September 1, 2014 by Artem Kaznatcheev 14 Comments
I believe that the original and most foundational version of the thesis is what I called Kleene’s purely mathematical formulation. Delving into this variant allowed us explore the philosophy of mathematics; Platonism; and the purpose, power and limitations of proof. However, because of the popularity of physicalism and authority of science, I doubt that Kleene’s is the most popular variant. Instead, when people think of the Church-Turing thesis, they often think of what is computable in the world around them. I like to associate this variant with Turing’s long time friend and student — Robin Gandy. I want to explore Gandy’s physical variant of the Church-Turing thesis to better understand the philosophy of science, theory-based conceptions, and the limits of falsifiability. In particular, I want to address what seems to me like the common misconception that the Church-Turing thesis is falsifiable.
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Filed under Commentary, Preliminary Tagged with Alan Turing, cstheory, Karl Popper, philosophy of science, quantum information processing