Chris, (01)
If you are really confused by my reference to the "pitfalls of formal
logic" I apologize. (02)
My comment was most directly in the context of the artificial
intelligence work of Marcus Hutter and Juergen Schmidhuber immediately
above in my original message. (03)
Traditionally AI has been approached as a problem of formal logic.
This has proven intractable for reasons which I believe closely
resemble those which prevented a basis in formal logic for
mathematics, broadly "Gödelian incompleteness". (04)
Hence by my lights formal logic has "pitfalls" as a basis for AI (and
mathematics.) (05)
The work of Schmidhuber and Hutter avoid these "pitfalls", by ignoring
formal logic and seeking a basis for meaning in
prediction/probability. (06)
It is interesting to compare this with, e.g. Greg Chaitin's work on
mathematical randomness (and also the retreat to "statistical models"
in computational linguistics.) (07)
As I said in the "Axiomatic ontology" thread I personally prefer to
look for a basis for this randomness in something like Vitiello's
"many-body system" approach (or Chris Anderson's "Google"/Robert
Laughlin's "bottom down", crystalline structure inspired, physics.)
But the different approaches don't conflict (no less the success of
"transformation invariance", as a fundamental parameter for
understanding the world, in "geometric" models.). (08)
-Rob (09)
On Sun, Sep 21, 2008 at 6:10 AM, Chris Menzel <cmenzel@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Sat, 20 Sep 2008, Rob Freeman wrote:
>> Re. "pitfalls": see earlier posts by me rejecting pointless arguments
>> over the meaning of words.
>
> Well, that's a disappointing response. You referred, plainly and
> simply, to "the pitfalls of formal logic", full stop. I asked you what
> you meant, as I could think of nothing that would count as such a
> pitfall and indeed could not, and still cannot, even come up with a
> sensible interpretation of the idea. But instead of explaining,
> defending, or backing away from it, you now appear to be trying to
> deflect attention away from the real issue by mischaracterizing my very
> clear question about your very unclear remark as a "pointless argument
> over the meaning of words". To the contrary, I have nowhere raised the
> question of the meaning of your words and indeed I am taking them at
> face value. On its face, your remark simply makes no sense. Your
> response above suggests to me that it is as indefensible as I'd
> suspected.
>
>> More narrowly note my comments were in response to Rich's reference
>> to:
>>
>> http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~soames/forthcoming_papers/Truth_and_Meaning.pdf
>>
>> The quote from Geoff Sampson supports a different approach to the
>> interpretation of language. I give it because others may be unfamiliar
>> with it.
>
> My apologies for misreading your intention.
>
> -chris (010)
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