ISBN: 9781156281215

Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: … Mehr…

Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: In philosophy, a supertask is a quantifiably infinite number of operations that occur sequentially within a finite interval of time. Supertasks are often referred to as "hypertasks" when the number of operations becomes innumerably infinite. The term supertask was coined by the philosopher James F. Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: In philosophy, a supertask is a quantifiably infinite number of operations that occur sequentially within a finite interval of time. Supertasks are often referred to as "hypertasks" when the number of operations becomes innumerably infinite. The term supertask was coined by the philosopher James F. Thomson, who devised Thomson's lamp, and the term hypertask derives from Clark and Read in their paper of that name. The origin of the interest in supertasks is normally attributed to Zeno of Elea. Zeno claimed that motion was impossible. He argued as follows: suppose our burgeoning "mover", Achilles say, wishes to move from A to B. To achieve this he must traverse half the distance from A to B. To get from the midpoint of AB to B Achilles must traverse half this distance, and so on and so forth. However many times he performs one of these "traversing" tasks there is another one left for him to do before he arrives at B. Thus it follows, according to Zeno, that motion (travelling a non-zero distance in finite time) is a supertask. Zeno further argues that supertasks are not possible (how can this sequence be completed if for each traversing there is another one to come?). It follows that motion is impossible. Zeno's argument takes the following form: Most subsequent philosophers reject Zeno's bold conclusion in favor of common sense. Instead they turn his argument on its head (assuming it's valid) and take it as a proof by contradiction where the possibility of motion is taken for granted. They accept the possibility of motion and apply modus tollens (contrapositive) to Zeno's argument to reach the conclusion that either motion is not a supertask or supertasks are in fact possible. Zeno himself also discusses the notion of what he calls "Achilles a. More: Books, , Hypercomputation~~Books-LLC, , , , , , , , , , General Books LLC<