The traditional explanation for the power of logic is “expressive precision,” but the experience of attempting to use logic in AI is that it totally fails for that. Specifically, whenever it encounters nebulosity, which is the main point of Part I of _The Eggplant_.
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De-semantification: If you read the word “raven” you usually get a visual image and are primed with all your background knowledge of ravens. Writing ɸ(x) instead of “is a raven” strips that off, and thereby inhibits the “merely reasonable” ways of thinking.
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Humans evolved for concrete sensorimotor activity (e.g. foraging) and for social relationship maintenance. We didn’t evolve for formal rationality; unfortunately there is no “System 2” logic box in the brain, and we are terrible at it. We can manage only with external aids…
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Calculation: external formal notation repurposes our sensorimotor skills to perform operations our brains unaided mostly can’t. Logical giant A.N. Whitehead: “By the aid of symbolism, we can make transitions in reasoning almost mechanically by the eye” &
@cdutilhnovaes below:pic.twitter.com/thW8x7tW6i
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A well-designed formalism, skillfully deployed, makes each next calculation step *visually obvious* and therefore difficult to screw up. Mathematicians speak of calculative rationality as “symbol pushing” because at a felt level that’s exactly what we’re doing.
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Examples: Putting terms in a commutative expression in the right order helps a lot even though “logically” it makes no difference. Align key symbols in formulae vertically on the page to group analogous clauses to make it clear what the next step is.
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Einstein notation replaces enormously complicated algebraic work with visually simple sub/superscript fiddling that analogizes kinesthetically to physically moving things around by hand. Also uses visually different symbols to track vector dimensions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_notation …pic.twitter.com/oBfWkyENZR
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Two quotes here from
@cdutilhnovaes about this. Also two of her key sources, which I haven’t yet looked into myself (but intend to).pic.twitter.com/CqSK3SAcna
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“The materiality of mathematics: Presenting mathematics at the blackboard” by
@greiffenhagen makes this much more concrete, through close study of a video of a lecturer presenting a proof of the completeness theorem for propositional logic.pic.twitter.com/Ru0J6xGfmz
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Here’s
@greiffenhagen showing the embodied, spacial, temporal, interactive nature of a proving of the Dutch Book Argument (cc@cdutilhnovaes)https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1005489362052632578 …
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(Going to pick up this unfinished thread tomorrow probably—have other things to do now!)
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Yesterday’s logic
got out of control. Shorter
here on formal logic as a social practice that is a somewhat-contingent product of cultural evolution:https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1150166188476862464 …Prikaži ovu nit
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