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Yes. Logic wasn't conjured up from abstract ideas, but from a concerted effort to distill the essence of what humans (regular, average people) find reasonable a
by felixyz 6y ago
Yes. Logic wasn't conjured up from abstract ideas, but from a concerted effort to distill the essence of what humans (regular, average people) find reasonable and convincing. (To mention just one example, there is a reason one of George Boole's major works is called "The Laws of Thought".)
Our strategies for understanding language also involve inference and unification that is similar to logic programming. This is not to say the exact semantics and evaluation strategy of Prolog is what humans carry around, but part of our cognitive apparatus clearly operates in a manner similar to logic, and by extension Prolog.
I discussed this topic with one of the inventors of Prolog recently: https://thesearch.space/episodes/1-the-poet-of-logic-programming https://thesearch.space/episodes/1-the-poet-of-logic-program...
- thom 6y agoI have no doubt that human or other intelligences can emulate and even to some extent intuit these rules. If you believe that's a _requirement_ for their intelligence, I think that's a stronger claim. Not one I'd vehemently argue against, but not one I'd personally be comfortable making.
- felixyz 6y agoI don't believe we emulate a set of rules that were somehow arbitrarily created at some point in history. I believe logic is something we discover (not invent) and it has roots in both human cognition and the physical world, and it's not fully known or understood exactly how they emerge. Hence, logic is still a developing field, and logic programming has indeed contributed to it. "Intelligence" is a vague term, but if you mean the ability to act rationally or even in a coherently self-interested way, then surely logic has something to do with it.
- thom 6y agoI don't really mean anything special by intelligence, but let's flatter ourselves that humans are born with some measure of it. I personally find it more likely than not that our particular form of intelligence is able to then _learn_ various rules of logical inference as a kind of metapattern. When I say 'emulate' I mean that we can, if we want, sit down with a pencil and paper and _force_ ourselves to evaluate things exactly via these rules, even if we don't instinctively follow them (or do so fuzzily). Obviously I could very easily be wrong, and we could possess hard coded rules of logical inference which form part of the basis for all the other things we do that you might call intelligence. But I'm not sure that anyone should claim "a general artificial intelligence would require a logical inference engine similar to Prolog".
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y agoPlotkin's thesis! You had an interview with Kowalski? Wow :)
- felixyz 6y agoYou're on my wish list for interviewees too :)
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y agoWot me? Haha! Wait another 20 years maybe! But thanks, that's so kind :D
- thelazydogsback 6y agoI listened to this a few weeks ago -- looking forward to the next episode!