Right! Unfortunately, because the feud between Catholics and Protestants at that time, the later seldom recognize the influences of the former and it seems that there were these “dark ages” until they arrived.
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.
> 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?
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.
They're very verbose and dense, and it strikes me that Neal Stephenson more or less wrote the three books just for himself, but it's worth checking out his "The Baroque Cycle" trilogy, culminating with "The System of the World."
It's fiction, but it's very eye-opening and mind-teasing fiction that puts a lot of contemporary moving parts in motion at the same time. And the books basically revolve around the Newton-Leibniz feud over inventing calculus.
The Baroque Cycle was the first thing I thought of too. Leibniz’s thinking about combinatoric representation of ideas makes a brief appearance in one of the many digressions in the trilogy.
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
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.
> 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]
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.
He was wrong because there are so many systems of thought; because he wasn't accounting for or aware of the existance of subconscious thought; because thoughts are context dependant; and of course because all formal systems of this sort tend to suffer incompleteness. However, I have only the greatest respect, as asking a question that leads to so many deep and interesting answers is far more difficult and important then having a "correct hypothesis".
"Taking the idea a step further, Llull invented what he called a volvelle, a circular paper mechanism with increasingly small concentric circles on which were written symbols representing the attributes of God."
So you are saying that Engineer's Disease is at least 700 years old.
ada lovelace was warned off poetry because her mom hated her dad, and pushed into science, and so she developed 'poetical science' aka general computing. (she was also inspired by embroidery card technology I think)
Whenever the world seems "known", one must pull back the covers and fin a more bizarre harder to explain version. It wouldn't surprise me in the least that it turns out our entire universe is just an Amoeba.
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.
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.
[+] [-] pier25|4 years ago|reply
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/let-us-calculate-leibni...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramon_Llull
[+] [-] chestertn|4 years ago|reply
See, for instance, the School of Salamanca: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/school-salamanca/
[+] [-] jmkr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joethrow29292|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lordleft|4 years ago|reply
To what extent did Leibniz impact Frege and the other architects of analytic philosophy? Isn't Begriffsschrift a similar project?
[+] [-] ronenlh|4 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] _jebn|4 years ago|reply
It's fiction, but it's very eye-opening and mind-teasing fiction that puts a lot of contemporary moving parts in motion at the same time. And the books basically revolve around the Newton-Leibniz feud over inventing calculus.
[+] [-] divbzero|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperpallium2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swayvil|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] KhoomeiK|4 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] nathias|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Banana699|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kwhitefoot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whatshisface|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shlurpy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] backtoyoujim|4 years ago|reply
So you are saying that Engineer's Disease is at least 700 years old.
[+] [-] emmelaich|4 years ago|reply
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/E...
[+] [-] sitkack|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awinter-py|4 years ago|reply
ada lovelace was warned off poetry because her mom hated her dad, and pushed into science, and so she developed 'poetical science' aka general computing. (she was also inspired by embroidery card technology I think)
[+] [-] sitkack|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brundolf|4 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] Banana699|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mdp2021|4 years ago|reply
Regulative ideals do not constitute a claim of achieved solution. Approximation of an ideal result is already an achievement.
[+] [-] poundofshrimp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malshe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] narag|4 years ago|reply
It would be so interesting watching her developing Calculus, thanks to her sightseeing powers while working for the emperor.
[+] [-] Rebelgecko|4 years ago|reply