The Truth Machine (2)

The world would be a machine with no output, of course - it could only inscribe 'output' into its own internal states, which, in their turn, would change the overall state of the machine and the nature of future inscriptions.

And these future inscriptions could have, as a valid interpretation, that some earlier inscriptions were false. Inscribed/not inscribed would not be true/false.

It looks at first as though we could have shown to be false / not yet shown to be false; but the statement 'X was shown to be false' is just another such (revisable) inscription.

This is the problem with the metaphor: the machine can have no 'interpretation' - it is just a machine. It inscribes what it inscribes, and does not inscribe what it does not inscribe. A Turing machine only halts, it does not judge; and the 'world as truth machine' has no such terminal state.

Except, of course, in one sense: that its terminal point, in terms of our present converstation, is whenever now is. This is because it is incoherent to say (in this conversation) that everything we are saying may not be true. It is necessarily true, for this conversation, that something we are saying may be true. (No computation of the machine could be interpreted as revising this, because its contrary is not a valid interpretation of any sayable thing.)

Does this count?

Maybe not: interpretation only takes place within a playable language game - it is an irreducibly semantic 'process'. It can't be restated syntactically. In this conversation, I validly conclude that 'X' is true; but this doesn't give me any guarantees about what 'strings' or 'symbols' ('X', '~X', or others) may be produced by the machine in the future - it only gives me a conclusion about how these could be interpreted by my interlocutors and myself. If 'X&~X' appears in the output, it can only appear as false or reinterpretable; but neither of these represent definite uninterpreted machine states.