[HN Gopher] In the 17th century, Leibniz dreamed of a machine th...
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In the 17th century, Leibniz dreamed of a machine that could
calculate ideas
Author : malshe
Score : 71 points
Date : 2021-11-13 14:49 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| lordleft wrote:
| > Leibniz's central argument was that all human thoughts, no
| matter how complex, are combinations of basic and fundamental
| concepts, in much the same way that sentences are combinations of
| words, and words combinations of letters. He believed that if he
| could find a way to symbolically represent these fundamental
| concepts and develop a method by which to combine them logically,
| then he would be able to generate new thoughts on demand.
|
| To what extent did Leibniz impact Frege and the other architects
| of analytic philosophy? Isn't Begriffsschrift a similar project?
| ronenlh wrote:
| Yes, I first read about Leibniz's machine from the wikipedia
| page on the Entscheidungsproblem.
|
| The research on this problem eventually led to the invention of
| Lambda calculus and the Turing machine (formal languages for
| computing), which proved that such a project is impossible, as
| on some inputs they infinitely recurse and can't output True or
| False.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entscheidungsproblem
|
| The source is Martin Davis, 2000, Engines of Logic
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| We take boolean logic for granted, yet Bool's Laws of Thought do
| a pretty astonishing job of expressing ideas, though at the same
| time are so far. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Laws_of_Thought
| agumonkey wrote:
| Also a direct link to shannon use of binary logic
| poundofshrimp wrote:
| (2019)
| malshe wrote:
| Thanks. I didn't see that while posting
| brundolf wrote:
| I kept assembling points I wanted to make in the comments, and
| then the article would cover them itself, so I'll just quote it:
|
| > He imagined that this machine, which he called "the great
| instrument of reason," would be able to answer all questions and
| resolve all intellectual debate. "When there are disputes among
| persons," he wrote, "we can simply say, 'Let us calculate,' and
| without further ado, see who is right."
|
| > But as today's data scientists devise ever-better algorithms
| for natural language processing, they're having debates that echo
| the ideas of Leibniz and Swift: Even if you can create a formal
| system to generate human-seeming language, can you give it the
| ability to understand what it's saying?
|
| This is the important part. Having the naivete to assume that a
| flawed mechanical system represents the whole of Truth, is worse
| than having no system at all.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _Having the naivete_
|
| Regulative ideals do not constitute a claim of achieved
| solution. Approximation of an ideal result is already an
| achievement.
| Banana699 wrote:
| > flawed mechanical system
|
| I don't like what "mechanical" is implying here, it gives the
| impression that humans have weird magic in their head that
| makes them understand language or search for truth (whatever
| approximate version they like anyway).
|
| It's just a flawed system, period. Your brain circuits are a
| flawed system, and the artifacts produced by the data science
| craze are flawed. They are not flawed equally, but they are all
| physical infromation processing systems trying to make sense of
| the weird jumble of signals coming to it from Outside.
| inafewwords wrote:
| Humans have a bit of irrationality that is based on their
| different POVs and experience. So the magic system is just
| that we have dynamic value systems. Shared culture through
| interconnected internet is making this less of a problem as
| the dynamic range is getting smaller or narrow enough to
| categorize
| brundolf wrote:
| The problem comes with rigidity and certainty. Using a flawed
| system with the acknowledgement that it's flawed is well and
| good. But "mechanical" components like hard data and logic
| often give the _illusion_ of being flawless and true in some
| absolute way. That doesn 't make them useless, but it means
| you have to work extra hard to keep in mind the fact that
| they are and always will be imperfect.
| yawboakye wrote:
| > Your brain circuits are a flawed system
|
| What a roundabout way to admit limitation both in knowledge
| and tools to investigate them. Except this one is more
| sinister because it almost closes the curtain on approaching
| this natural order (of brain circuitry) with both humility
| and curiosity.
| Banana699 wrote:
| >What a roundabout way to admit limitation both in
| knowledge and tools to investigate them.
|
| Why? I view humans (and all biological beings really) as
| machines, fantastic contraptions of unimaginable complexity
| that push the materials they are made of to the absoulute
| limits. Their brains are the pattern-matching subsystem
| responsible for Command, Control and Communcications. Maybe
| expressing limitations in terms of circuits is roundabout
| to you, but it's perfectly natural for me.
|
| >it almost closes the curtain on approaching this natural
| order (of brain circuitry) with both humility and curiosity
|
| Again, why? is it because "Circuits" somehow imply rigidity
| or fixity ? that's not true at all, plenty of circuits can
| change their structure while they're operating. And even
| fixed circuits can be so complex and of so many signal
| paths that they seem to have a mind of their own,
| especially in a dynamic changing enviroment.
|
| I don't know about humility*, but the two grandfathers of
| neural networks, McCulloch and Pitts, were both very
| curious about the brain, and they used ideas from logic and
| cybernetics to study it. The Nobel-prize-winning Hodgkin-
| Huxley model is another framework that looks at the
| activity inside a neuron in circuit-theoritic terms such as
| capacitors and current sources.
|
| * : That said, "All of your views and opinions are the
| product of a few billion capacitors wired together" seems
| to me like a pretty humble way to go through life.
| jmkr wrote:
| Leibniz is definitely an interesting person. I studied about him
| in philosophy, but in grad school I focused more on his
| contribution to the ideas of computers. Leibniz and Pascal is a
| good starting point in history.
| joethrow29292 wrote:
| What about the other 4 billion years?
| pier25 wrote:
| Leibniz was inspired by Ramon Llull, a 13th century
| philospher/mystic/poet from Mallorca.
|
| https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/let-us-calculate-leibni...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramon_Llull
| swayvil wrote:
| It suggests that thought is not necessarily _generative_. That we
| are not generating ideas. That my ideas are not created out of my
| head.
|
| An alternative model is that thought is performed by the
| manipulation of references. References to an _idea landscape_.
| Anybody who writes software is familiar.
|
| (Sequences and hierarchies of idea-references give us complex
| ideas)
|
| > Leibniz's central argument was that all human thoughts, no
| matter how complex, are combinations of basic and fundamental
| concepts, in much the same way that sentences are combinations of
| words, and words combinations of letters.
| nathias wrote:
| Leibniz invented the modern world as a side project. Computer
| science, relativity, nuclear physics can all be traced to him.
| whatshisface wrote:
| You can say that about almost any mathematician in history.
| nathias wrote:
| You really can't.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Relativity was one of Galileo's contributions, earlier than
| Leibnitz: 1632 in his 'Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World
| Systems'. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galilean_invariance
| Banana699 wrote:
| >relativity, nuclear physics
|
| Are those just there because of calculus? that's doubly unfair
| if so. Unfair beacuse there is a huge amount of work that went
| into those besides simply calculus, and unfair for all those
| who contributed to calculus before him.
|
| Frankly, I wouldn't even attribute CS to him, he did have a
| mechanistic view of logic, but that alone doesn't strike me as
| revolutionary, it was the age of mechanical machines after all,
| somebody was bound to apply the idea to symbolic manipualation.
| CS's father on the engineering side is Babbage, it's father on
| the mathematics side is Russel or Turing.
| zosima wrote:
| Leibniz was born one and a half century before Babbage and
| nearly two and a half century before Russel and Turing.
|
| To compare them is immensely unfair to Leibniz and completely
| ignores how visionary and far ahead of his time he actually
| was.
| nathias wrote:
| Everything you assume is false. I'm refering to the fact he
| came up with the modern concept now known as energy, which he
| called vis viva. Why are you making things up, he didn't have
| a mechanistic view of logic, he invented the concept of
| possible worlds, but for CS what is important is his side
| project of charachteristica universalis and his introduction
| of binary formalization.
| Banana699 wrote:
| >he came up with the modern concept now known as energy,
| which he called vis viva
|
| I forgot that, but crediting relativity and nuclear physics
| to Conservation Of Energy still feels like a big stretch to
| me. Maybe Thermodynamics.
|
| >he didn't have a mechanistic view of logic, he invented
| the concept of possible worlds
|
| I'm not sure I understand why those two things contradict
| each other. He envisioned a machine doing reasoning, that's
| a "mechanistic view of logic" in my book. How is possible
| worlds related to that and why are they in tension in your
| opinion ?
|
| >charachteristica universalis and his introduction of
| binary formalization
|
| Fair enough, those two things are fairly radical for his
| time and very CSy. But neither is original to him, his
| charachteristica universalis is based on a misunderstanding
| of chinese ideographs, and there were people contemporary
| to him like John Wilkins who worked on very similar things
| ('philosophical languages'), the idea was in the air at the
| time.
|
| The binary numerals were also inspired by certain chinese
| texts, and some claim[1] that he plagiarised them outright
| from contemporaries. All said and done though, I don't
| think binary numbers are that important or fundamental to
| computers, only the idea that numbers (and abstract ideas
| in general) can be operated on purely syntactically without
| the slightest clue as to their meaning, and still yield
| useful results; This is an idea much older than Leibniz.
| Also Babbage managed to design a perfectly good computer on
| base-10, and binary was just one system among many in the
| 1940s.
|
| [1]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314485403_Who_D
| isco...
| nathias wrote:
| The paper you link is like garbage, there are plenty of
| resourcces that are intellectually honest. Leibniz did
| take binary form I Ching, where it was used to formalize
| bones thrown on turtle shells for fortune telling, to
| consider this 'plagiarism' is idiotic.
| lostmsu wrote:
| The mathematics side of CS would be Godel probably.
| yawboakye wrote:
| The mathematics of CS is mainly logic, for which Godel
| isn't essentially the leading light. Very important
| theories he contributed, but they don't necessarily define
| logic. I'd be more inclined to attribute to Russell or any
| of his influencers (like Frege).
| bopbeepboop wrote:
| CS would undoubtedly be John von Neumann.
| [deleted]
| KhoomeiK wrote:
| > if he could find a way to symbolically represent these
| fundamental concepts and develop a method by which to combine
| them logically, then he would be able to generate new thoughts on
| demand
|
| Reminds me of some recent neurosymbolic work, like "DreamCoder:
| Growing generalizable, interpretable knowledge with wake-sleep
| Bayesian program learning" [1]
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.08381
| narag wrote:
| I can't wait for Apple TV to make a Leibniz biopic series as they
| did with Asimov's Foundation.
|
| It would be so interesting watching her developing Calculus,
| thanks to her sightseeing powers while working for the emperor.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Maybe they'll just pick up the rights to Stephenson's Baroque
| Cycle
| InTheArena wrote:
| It's amazing that no one has done this yet.
|
| Just get Johnny Depp to play Jack Shaftoe.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| If Snow Crash ever makes it out of development hell, I
| think it becomes more likely
| usrusr wrote:
| But would Johnny Depp still be willing to reprise his role of
| syphillitic Jack?
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