Cities: Skylines Is Turing Complete

Essentially it means that City Skylines could compute anything that it is possible to compute, given enough time. Therefore it is functionally equivalent to the computer you're typing on. In reality, like all computers, it has memory constraints which limit what it can do. A true Turing machine needs infinite memory, which is impossible.

Here's a (legal) free version: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/3144/1/adoisr.pdf

I recommend this extension: https://unpaywall.org/

Idea for the sci-fi story: after the civilization collapse, the only computing device that has survived is an arcade machine, with a difficult game that accidentally is Turing complete. People need to program it, so they can use the results to reboot the power/transportation/medical equipment/etc.

I don't own a private email account, but the authors I could recommend are anything by the aforementioned pragmatists (particularly Peirce), work by Van Fraasen, and work by Macintyre. Kuhn and Laudan are also a big ones for science-focused stuff. I also brought up Floridi because he'd at least be sympathetic to the plight of computational theorists while also providing disagreement from the philosophical mainstream.

The point of all of the above is to realize that modern philosophy has made three different "turns":

1) The linguistic turn

2) The pragmatic turn

3) The discursive turn

All three point to the idea that almost all acts of knowledge are social and communicative acts, and that all claims being made between us are from perspectives we assume and inherit from others. They amount to saying that no inquiry is done in a vacuum, and all inquiry is open to criticism of some form or another. In which case we shouldn't expect to ever converge on a singular Truth, but rather be constantly negotiating a network of truths between ourselves as long as we are finite and limited beings.

These positions are reactions to middle-of-the-century philosophy that supposed that all knowledge can be treated through a uniform standard (like science, or logic, or faith), and that any knowledge which is true, is true without qualification or the need to ascribe context, including the context of our language or the context of our goals. Both of these positions can be considered "positivist", which is the philosophy that made physics productive in the 20th century but ended up being unhelpful for other fields (like economics or biology), as well as ignoring certain complexities that all forms of inquiry (including physics) share.

The primary struggle that positivists gain when they are exposed to these views is that they think it implies relativism. This isn't quite right, since it's possible to agree as well as disagree with people; but it does imply certain theses inconvenient to the goals of positivism, like the impossibility of a final theory between all modes of knowledge. It might be plausible to have a final theory with respect to a perspective or set of postulates -- like maybe an atomic theory of viruses -- but that would always be irreconcilable with other perspectives which have their own merits, leaving it to the individual to decide the value of each. The good news is that there is always room for thought.

This paper is also excellent for introducing the mechanics of semiotics in discourse, in that most discursive of disciplines, the Law. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0a7f/1fd305239da9232f182fbc... Law makes a good example since people have a lot of conceptions of what having rules of law means. We are obliged to the law by convention and negotiation, rather than by some eternal Truth. Likewise, to the extent that any science is discursive, there will be a sense in which it has to be legalistic, although there are more effective ways which we stop ourselves from spiraling into relativism here (primarily by instrumentation).

If you are willing to wait a bit I can get back to you on this once I have an email account.

Yeah, C:S will gobble RAM like there's no tomorrow, especially if you've got a lot of mods installed.