Re: Constructor Theory & Optimism

On 16 Dec 2012, at 18:56, hibbsa <[email protected]> wrote:

> Unless I missed it, you didn't expand on why this connection shows up
> (which was fair enough given the scope of the paper).  I was quite
> interested in why the reason might be....the only visualization I could
> come up was that you must be envisaging the product of CT as a kind of
> network of possible routes of discovery, the optimism being that those
> routes are there. Just a stab...but you got any time to expand on that
> one a bit?

The connection is stated briefly in Section 3.2 of the paper, which begins:

>> Impossible tasks cannot be effected regardless of what knowledge is brought to bear. But if the right knowledge is applied, any possible task A can necessarily be effected in practice with arbitrary accuracy short of perfection, for the following reason:

I don't name this implication 'optimism' in the paper because that word is used in various incompatible ways by philosophers.

It's a fairly direct consequence of the shift from the prevailing conception, which assumes that all fundamental laws are laws distinguishing between what happens and what doesn't happen, to the constructor-theoretic conception which assumes that they distinguish between possible and impossible transformations.

-- David Deutsch