dirish@csc-sun.math.utah.edu (Dudley Irish) (06/27/91)
Well I made the mistake of mentioning this discussion to a friend of mine who is a professor of philosophy. Her immediate response was, "You idiots, finite."(:-) She went on to explain that any conception of the meaning of the word "thought" which would allow you to suppose that there might be an infinite (countable or otherwise in the mathematical sense) number of thoughts had stripped everything interesting from the meaning of the word as used in normal discourse. Off the top of her head she mentioned a number of features of what we generally think of as thoughts that would lead you to conclude that there must be only a finite number and a relatively small number at that. The point of all this, is that we are not free to redefine the term "thought" to mean brain state. It does have a very complex definition and it is already in the language. If we want to consider how many brain states the brain is capable of, the we may feel free to do so. Its just that I think we are mistaken if we misuse (my opinion) the term "thought" to refer to them. -- Dudley Irish / dirish@math.utah.edu / Manager Computer Operations Center for Scientific Computing, Dept of Mathematics, University of Utah The views expressed in this message do not reflect the views of the Dept of Mathematics, the University of Utah, or the State of Utah.