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> Rationality’s building blocks are themselves not rational. I don’t know where this idea came from that logical thought somehow springs into life fully formed

> Rationality’s building blocks are themselves not rational. I don’t know where this idea came from that logical thought somehow springs into life fully formed at once. Certainly not from me :-P I'm fully aware that human rationality is one technique trained on top of our common diffuse thinking. Heck, we invented machines to perform rational steps for us without errors. Once you build a consistent rational system though, you can trust that it will always produce internally coherent knowledge (as long as no bugs external to the system are introduced). That behaviour requires algorithms, not statistical inference.

SanderNL 3y ago
> Certainly not from me Oh for sure. I’m just aimlessly rambling at this point. > That behaviour requires algorithms, not statistical inference. I’m not sure that’s possible. “Rational” systems may be an oxymoron and/or only applicable in extremely narrow domains. Like calculators. I’m getting the vibe anything approaching generality will be by nature vague. I just hope we can increase the “illusion of rationality”-bandwidth so it coincides with our needs in the workforce.
- TuringTest 3y ago
  Rational system is anything that follows a mathematically formal process. This server where we post our messages is a rational system, as well as any deterministic software. It's not a high bar to achieve. There may be limits to rationality (both for being incomplete to describe the world and for generating results that can't be demonstrated within themselves), but being rational by itself is nothing more than the capability to apply formal logic, i.e the capability to generate a sequence of sentences derived from the previous steps and a limited number of rules of inference.
  - SanderNL 3y ago
    Mathematics, rationality, logic, "formal process". They are like talking about "threads", "file descriptors" and "inodes". Fancy abstractions, but what are they abstracting away precisely? What are the roots they are trying to hide? Is the foundation of logic itself logical? Of course this degenerates into word-play quickly, but the problem itself isn't solved (or diminished) by word-play. > It's not a high bar to achieve. I'm not sure I agree. It's not trivial at all to produce a system that can support what you call logic and formal processes, both cognitively - you have to think it up in the first place and Turing and von Neumann and others were no slouches - and physically as the history of and continued development of computational circuitry shows. I think what you call rational or well-behaved systems are just mirages or shadows that pop into life once a specific pattern of fundamentally non-rational behaviours intersect just right. I, of course, am unhindered by any actual knowledge or competency in this domain so I wouldn't read too much into what my unhinged subconscious is spewing forth.
    - TuringTest 3y ago
      > Fancy abstractions, but what are they abstracting away precisely? What are the roots they are trying to hide? Is the foundation of logic itself logical? Of course the foundations of logic are not logical themselves. Symbolic human thought grows from the natural capabilities of the brain, there are not universal axioms that can be extracted fully formed from the void. That's what rationalist philosophers for wrong (but then, they didn't have neuroscience and electric scanners). > > It's not a high bar to achieve. > I'm not sure I agree. It's not trivial at all to produce a system that can support what you call logic and formal processes We're talking at different levels. Building the concept of formal rational systems to order thoughts was a huge achievement of philosophers, first the Greeks and later XIX mathematicians like Bool and Russell and the computer builders. But what I say that's easy is building a new specific system on top of those foundations. It may be as simple as writing a regular expression, which defines a full (if limited) formal grammar. I agree that their power to represent and order the patterns of thought you find in life is more limited than what engineers believe; but when you find a domain of science where it can be applied, it's a very powerful tool to explore consequences and avoid or fix biases and misconceptions.

SanderNL 3y ago

> Certainly not from me Oh for sure. I’m just aimlessly rambling at this point. > That behaviour requires algorithms, not statistical inference. I’m not sure that’s possible. “Rational” systems may be an oxymoron and/or only applicable in extremely narrow domains. Like calculators. I’m getting the vibe anything approaching generality will be by nature vague. I just hope we can increase the “illusion of rationality”-bandwidth so it coincides with our needs in the workforce.

TuringTest 3y ago
Rational system is anything that follows a mathematically formal process. This server where we post our messages is a rational system, as well as any deterministic software. It's not a high bar to achieve. There may be limits to rationality (both for being incomplete to describe the world and for generating results that can't be demonstrated within themselves), but being rational by itself is nothing more than the capability to apply formal logic, i.e the capability to generate a sequence of sentences derived from the previous steps and a limited number of rules of inference.
- SanderNL 3y ago
  Mathematics, rationality, logic, "formal process". They are like talking about "threads", "file descriptors" and "inodes". Fancy abstractions, but what are they abstracting away precisely? What are the roots they are trying to hide? Is the foundation of logic itself logical? Of course this degenerates into word-play quickly, but the problem itself isn't solved (or diminished) by word-play. > It's not a high bar to achieve. I'm not sure I agree. It's not trivial at all to produce a system that can support what you call logic and formal processes, both cognitively - you have to think it up in the first place and Turing and von Neumann and others were no slouches - and physically as the history of and continued development of computational circuitry shows. I think what you call rational or well-behaved systems are just mirages or shadows that pop into life once a specific pattern of fundamentally non-rational behaviours intersect just right. I, of course, am unhindered by any actual knowledge or competency in this domain so I wouldn't read too much into what my unhinged subconscious is spewing forth.
  - TuringTest 3y ago
    > Fancy abstractions, but what are they abstracting away precisely? What are the roots they are trying to hide? Is the foundation of logic itself logical? Of course the foundations of logic are not logical themselves. Symbolic human thought grows from the natural capabilities of the brain, there are not universal axioms that can be extracted fully formed from the void. That's what rationalist philosophers for wrong (but then, they didn't have neuroscience and electric scanners). > > It's not a high bar to achieve. > I'm not sure I agree. It's not trivial at all to produce a system that can support what you call logic and formal processes We're talking at different levels. Building the concept of formal rational systems to order thoughts was a huge achievement of philosophers, first the Greeks and later XIX mathematicians like Bool and Russell and the computer builders. But what I say that's easy is building a new specific system on top of those foundations. It may be as simple as writing a regular expression, which defines a full (if limited) formal grammar. I agree that their power to represent and order the patterns of thought you find in life is more limited than what engineers believe; but when you find a domain of science where it can be applied, it's a very powerful tool to explore consequences and avoid or fix biases and misconceptions.