Daybook I
By Richard Weyhrauch
This file is called:
[DAYBOOK]
The notations used in this note is described in
[NOTATION]
I have decided to keep a daybook. I do not kinow if I will keep this up. When I was younger I always imagined that I would someday write up my thoughts - later. Now that I am older, later has arrived. ... So
Background
I have been reviving my library at home. There are many misplaced books and it has been fun for me to 'find' many of them again.
Today I realized that they fall into several groups:
- Logic Books
- Math Books
- History of Math Books
- books about mind and machine
- There are other groups
These have become important to me because of my mania for building an artifact that can think and I realized that it is incumbent on me to have some idea of what people have previously thought. This has two parts: old and new. By old I mean historical works that have influenced current thought. By new I mean what has been happening over the last thirty years or so. Since I left the University I have essentially dropped out of the discussion and lots (both good and bad) has happened since then. One of my goals is to catch up on both old (much of which I have read before) and new literature to be able to speak knowledgably about the state of the art when writing about my current ideas about how to build a thinker.
This daybook is mostly for me to record what I do each day and to make some remarks about what I have discovered. This is mostly for me. My memory needs help.
Sept 13 2011 arc/replace.emx arc/ocr-fix.emx ;; I want to make these the "standard" file fixup files" ;; we might move them found finish/DATAB.LSP contains ARC fixup code ;; in finish/ FIX.PER OBJECT.FIX good and fixup ideas web-fix.emx fixup ideas SPELL01.EMX ideas Sept 17, 2011 Ideas U.S. and Confederate generals/soldiers
October 19, 2015
Today I rediscovered some of the books in group five above.
Discovered |anderson-minds| in my library. Started reading |putnum-minds|. The basic point that he made was that many philosophical problems would apply to a turing machine as well as a person and so these problems do no rule out the possibility that we could have an 'artificial' mind. I do not agree with his equating such a mind with a Turing Machine, but it seems to me that his discussion is applicable to a more nuanced idea of what such a mind would be like.
I realized that I do not have to review every historical discussion in order to have a credable idea of how to build a thinking artifact. I simply need a clear description of my ideas.
I started rereading a set of lecture note by Martin-Lof on intuitionistic type theory and it has reignited my interest in the notion of judgement. Rereading it also suggested to me |russell-principles|.
October 26, 2015
Last night I read a short description of Indian Logic.
Two ideas struck me
1) It distinguished between an argument you would use to convince yourself that a proposition is true and an argument you might use to convince someone else it was true, and it gave some examples. I think this might have relevance to one of Peter's projects.
2) In the argument for others it remarks that it is not necessary to assert a universal to convince someone but only to provide examples. This is suprising like the skolem interpretation of universals.
It also says that perhaps the former is logic and the latter is rhetoric (in the Western sense). If this is true then there is an entire literature to read. Arrrrrrgh.
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I have begun seriously reading the 'pre-set-theory' literature of logic. Although the language is 'old fashioned', the issues are untainted by a century of research dominated by formal set theory. In this sense it is hard, and obscure but reveals the issues people were struggling with as 'set theory' and 'formal logic' was being 'invented'.
There is a sense in which the success of 'set theory' has distorted the issues. (Maybe catagory theory and HOTT are a reaction to this)