What are the most beautiful pieces of writing qua writing that you know?
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Replying to @michael_nielsen
Wittgenstein's Tractatus is an attempt to build a computational language to support thought. It is sparse, clean, austere, a single thought spanning 75 pages. He builds on the Church Turing thesis before Turing, and preempts the logicist program of AI, including its failure.
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Replying to @Plinz @michael_nielsen
hard to get excited about an effort of wittgentstein's to build a language after philosophical investigations
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i think the juxtaposition of the two tomes is instructional. one captures russell's logic and the other refutes it with social. we see this progression in computing science. from object based structures to social. does a word define an object or does its use bring about the word?
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I might just be caught in an immature stage, but I don’t think social can be foundational in any way. The problem is dealing with domains that don’t readily yield to low dimensional, discrete operators.
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define discrete
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Grammatical language requires discretization, and not by sampling into large integers, but by decomposition into groups of very few items (chunks).
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ok, lets go with that definition for now. next question is, what are you discretising?
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Arbitrary domains, but it fails most obviously for visual perception.
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so arbitrary perceptual domains. i presume conversations may be one? if not, can you give an example?
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Natural language has continuous emphasis but is otherwise discrete. Comprehending it requires a model of what is being talked about, which may well be the whole of our experience.
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and this model is composed of discrete parts much like a continuous real number line which contains integers?
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An infinite precision real number is not composed by adding integers (which gives integers) or averaging them (which gives rational numbers), but by a generator function that yields a suitable operation over an infinite series.
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