Tags / 37 quotes from 14 sources
#logic
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
True and false as mere convention
Returning to infinity, it turns out that there is at least a conceptual relationship between the infinity of values between one and zero, and the infinity of values that voltage can have on a computer switch. The binary logic that underlies the computer is an approximation of…
Leibniz: propagating faith through science
But Leibniz’s real reasons for wanting a binary numbering system were much deeper than the philistine goal of counting money. Leibniz, like almost all scientists of his day, was also deeply religious. He dreamed of inventing a universal language of logic that could once and for…
There is no computation inside a computer
In an email discussion I had with Riccardo Manzotti, he writes: We use logic and computation to build artifacts—from chairs to spaceships. We need logic and computation as an extension of our innate mental tools. They help us to achieve the precision and generality that we need…
Gödel and the limits of AI
Roger Penrose argues that because humans can grasp Gödel’s theory, the mind is not a formal logical system. He argues that the source of our intuitions and consciousness must come from a new kind of quantum physics. Leonid Perlovsky says that within AI the consequences of…
Logic might be the greatest hallucination
believe this logical bias might be the source of the “computational stance.” We are biased toward explaining the world with logic and computations because this is the only way that the brain can make sense of reality. Logic itself might be the greatest hallucination. Perlovsky…
Human, All Too Human: A Book For Free Spirits
Logic and mathematics
Logic itself rests upon assumptions to which nothing in the world of reality corresponds. For example, the correspondence of certain things to one another and the identity of those things at different periods of time are assumptions pure and simple, but the science of logic…
Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina)
Penrose's Gödelian argument against computable thought
To support his argument, Penrose appeals to a fundamental theorem in mathematical logic – Gödel’s Theorem – which states that certain mathematical truths cannot be proved by using a computational procedure. Because human mathematicians evidently can arrive at these truths…
Thinking as calculation, from Hobbes onwards
The idea that knowledge can be formalized is not new. For centuries the act of thinking has been seen as calculation based on logical reasoning. Newell and Simon’s physical symbol systems hypothesis has its roots in the work of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679).
Leibniz's Characteristica Universalis
Hobbes’s “parcels” were the basic units of thought, just as symbols are basic to Newell and Simon’s Physical Symbol Systems Hypothesis. Hobbes’s ideas were furthered by the mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) who tried to identify an appropriate…
AI builds on logic as thought
Logical reasoning requires the manipulation of sentences described in a logical language. These sentences can be interpreted as representing concepts such as states of affairs in the world – or knowledge. Using computers to automate this process, Al has taken the “logic as…
Can common sense be formalized?
The CYC project is entering its final phase, with Lenat predicting a 50% chance of success. Apart from the practical benefits of a successful CYC project, the theoretical objective is to test Newell and Simon’s hypothesis. Is commonsense something that we can formalize and…
The "just one more rule" defence
A recurring justification for the inadequacy of logic-based systems is the “just one more rule” defence. Rather than questioning the enterprise as a whole, the tendency is to persevere with the powerful idea of formalized knowledge dating back to Hobbes.
Lo Spirito del Giappone (Leonardo Vittorio Arena)
Quattro modi della relazione causale
Anche la concezione del rapporto causa/effetto appare innovativa. Shotoku riconosce quattro possibilità di relazione: cumulativa, retributiva, reciproca e affine. Gli esempi vertono sulla pratica spirituale. La causa può avere effetti cumulativi: il continuo esercizio della…
La scuola del vuoto di Nagarjuna
Il Mahayana: la scuola Sanron o dei Tre Trattati Deriva da una scuola cinese, a sua volta la continuazione della scuola indiana del vuoto (shunyavada) o della via di mezzo. In India il suo principale esponente fu Nagarjuna (II sec. d.C.), in Cina Chi-tsang (549-623). In…
Il vuoto non è un'opinione
Non si ammette alcun concetto, e ogni teoria può essere smentita o demolita. Nei toni di una dialettica serrata non si sostiene alcuna posizione e ci si limita a contraddire l’interlocutore, mostrandogli l’inconsistenza dei suoi assunti. È il metodo della reductio ad absurdum…
Onishi Hajime, mediatore tra Oriente e Occidente
Hajime (1864-1900) è un altro pensatore dell’epoca Meiji. Nato nella prefettura di Okayama, frequentò una scuola cristiana e si laureò in filosofia a Tokyo. Dopo aver insegnato all’università Waseda di Tokyo, studiò filosofia in Germania per poi tornare in patria in risposta…
Medieval Semiotics (meier-oeser, Stephan)
Ockham's logic and the mentalization of sign
Ockham's logic marks an important, though not the only important, step in the process that might be described as a progressive ‘mentalization’ of sign. The idea behind this process is the contention that without some sort of ‘intentionality’ the phenomena of sign, signification…
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
Leibniz's law against the identity theory
There were a number of objections to the identity theory. I find it useful to distinguish between the technical objections and the common-sense objections. The first technical objection was that the theory seemed to violate a principle of logic called “Leibnitz’s Law.”11 The…
The type-token distinction
In order to explain this distinction I need to say a bit about the type-token distinction. If I write the word “dog” three times: “dog dog dog,” have I written one word or three? Well, I have written three instances, or tokens, of one type of word. So we need a distinction…
Rigid designators
Kripke’s argument appeals to the concept of a “rigid designator.” A rigid designator is defined as an expression that always refers to the same object in any possible state of affairs. Thus, the expression, “Benjamin Franklin,” is a rigid designator because in the usage that I…
Intentionality-with-a-t and intensionality-with-an-s
Intentionality-with-a-t, as we have seen, is that property of the mind by which it is directed at or about or of objects and states of affairs in the world independent of itself. Intensionality-with-an-s is opposed to extensionality. It is a property of certain sentences…
Substitution and existential inference
Formally we can put this as follows: 1. [(a=b) & Fa]Fb. If a is identical with b and a has property F, then b has property F. Thus from 2. Caesar crossed the Rubicon. and 3. Caesar is identical with Mark Anthony’s best friend. we can infer 4. Mark Anthony’s best friend…
Nothing inherently intensional about intentionality
The important thing to remember about the distinction between intentionality-with-a-t and intensionality-with-an-s is that there is nothing inherently intensional about intentionality. A statement to the effect that Brutus believes that Caesar crossed the Rubicon is indeed an…
Induction cannot ground the uniformity of nature
Unless we presuppose some sort of uniformity of nature, the uniformity of nature guaranteed by causality and causation, we have no ground for inductive arguments. But, and this is the crucial point, there is no ground for the belief in the uniformity of nature, because any such…
Nature-branded Journal Goes Open Access-only: Can We Celebrate Already? | Open Knowledge Foundation Blog
Alternatives to gold model open access
Are there no alternatives to this commodified, market-oriented logic currently in play in scientific publishing? Will this logic (and its serious disadvantages) be always dominant, regardless if the journal is "proprietary" or open access? Well, not necessarily: even within the…
Nishida Kitarō (stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy)
Restoring the rigor of logic to experience
We may understand his philosophical project overall as an attempt to restore to experience and consciousness the rigor, necessity and universality accorded to logic. This project developed in a direction quite opposite to that of psychologism, which would reduce logic to the…
Ontology
Logic plus ontology makes a language
The subject of ontology is the study of the categories of things that exist or may exist in some domain. The product of such a study, called an ontology, is a catalog of the types of things that are assumed to exist in a domain of interest D from the perspective of a person who…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Quantitative versus qualitative identity
For philosophers, ‘identity’ comes in two main forms: quantitative and qualitative. Two or more things are qualitatively identical when interchanging them would make no difference. For instance, if you have two qualitatively identical bowling balls, it makes no difference which…
Leibniz's law
Quantitative identity is governed by a strict logic, summed up in what has become known as Leibniz’s law. In essence this says that if x and y are the same object, then what is true of x at any given time is also true of y at that same time. This is why two merely qualitatively…
Two questions of personal identity
One way of looking at this is that, rather than there being one question of personal identity, there are actually (at least) two different questions. There is a logical question about the identity of objects and the existential question about what matters to us about our…
The false precision of personal identity theory
The philosophy of personal identity is, unfortunately, a prime example of this. It is fatally flawed by its goal of stating the strict logical conditions for the persistence of a person over time. Because this is how the whole debate is framed, it tends to underestimate the…
Are person and self sortal concepts?
The false assumption can be put in another way. Concepts such as ‘person’ and ‘self’ are taken to be either ‘sortals’ or useless. A sortal concept is one which allows you to count the number of things to which that concept applies, and to specify the conditions for their…
Rigorous without being strict
This claim is only disturbing if you think ‘strict’ is the same as ‘rigorous’. We don’t have to lapse into obfuscatory fog just because we reject the possibility of logical rigidity. It goes back to the idea that we can be as precise as possible without being totally precise.
The Essence Of The Essence Of Constructivism
The essence of constructivism
In one famous article dating from 1988 (German edition 1998), Maturana states that the problem of reality is “the most important problem of our time”. I fully agree with him and I think that realism needs to be expressively refuted and the choice between realism and…
The Philosophical Computer: Exploratory Essays In Philosophical Computer Modeling
Computers as a new environment for philosophical modeling
Philosophical modeling is as old as philosophy itself; examples range from Plato's Cave and the Divided Line to Rawls's original position. What is new are the astounding computational resources now available for philosophical modeling. Although the computer cannot offer a…
The Tao Of Topic Maps
Conceptual graphs
Indexes, glossaries and thesauri are all ways of mapping the knowledge structures that exist implicitly in books and other sources of information. In the field of AI (Artificial Intelligence) there also exists the need to be able to represent knowledge (and meaning), in order…
Theories of Childhood, Second Edition (Carol Garhart Mooney)
Formal operations and hypothetical thinking
The final stage Piaget outlined is formal operations. This stage begins around age eleven or twelve and is marked by the ability to think logically and in hypothetical terms. According to Piaget, once this stage is reached, young people can wrestle with such questions as “Is it…