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Logical reasoning is a tool we use to form an understand the world, but it is not the foundation of the understanding itself. To use an analogy, saying humans a
by fnovd 11y ago
Logical reasoning is a tool we use to form an understand the world, but it is not the foundation of the understanding itself. To use an analogy, saying humans are fundamentally rational because we use reasoning to make decisions is like saying birds are musicians because they communicate with song.
The article was absolutely not saying that we should abandon logic. It simply said that our efforts in building any sort of "understanding" with computers have been more fruitful when relying on analogy and classification as a basis rather than "pure" logic.
- YeGoblynQueenne 11y agoClassification of course, assigning entities to categories according to their attributes, is itself logic. Making a distinction between "reasoning by analogy" and "reasoning with logic" is actually pretty weird. Analogy is also (informal) logic - drawing attention to the common characteristics of objects and reasoning about their therefore shared attributes. What Hinton really means, at least as I understand it, is "reasoning with approximation" not by analogy. But, approximation is what you do when you _can't_ do logic. It's your recourse when you can't do the optimal, which is indeed, reasoning with logic according to knowledge. Hinton is advocating that, because we managed to get ahead with some hard problems by approximating solutions, we should forget about ever getting a good understanding of the problems. But that's dangerous, defeatist and goes against the way we've progressed pretty much throughout all of human civilisation so far.