BTW: As long as we're going down the "formal tools" rabbit hole, an important bit of history bears mentioning.
About the time HP kicked Tom and me out of Fiorina's $500M "Internet Chapter 2" fiasco, Federico Faggin stepped up to the plate to fund the work. Although Faggin wasn't directly aware of what Tom did under my sponsorship at HP, he _was_ aware of the need for better formal tools in VLSI design, and found imaginary logic an intriguing approach. So he endowed The Boundary Institute, which Richard Shoup founded and Shoup hired Tom as the theorist. This work became side-tracked when Dean Radin and Edwin May showed up to pursue psi research from the empirical side. That was most unfortunate, not because there can be no interpretation of QM under which "paranormal" theories may be tested empirically, but because they paid little attention to Tom's output and sucked all the air out of the room, so to speak. So they merely added more to the corpus of "evidence" for psi phenomena, without doing anything to ground such experimental work on (meta)physical theory. There was only one exception to this -- an experiment designed by Tom based on his approach to QM -- but the experiment was postponed until Faggin's original endowment was running out, not to be renewed due to inadequate pursuit of VLSI tools. By then Radin and May were looking for psi funding with Radin ending up bolting for The Institute for Noetic Sciences, where it was easier to raise such funds. All in all it was a very bad decision Shoup made letting those guys come in. Both Tom and Dick were left without material support pretty much for the rest of their lives. They both passed away several years later. I was barely able to salvage Tom's ANPA West journal archives, and one last paper -- bringing everything together -- progress on which stopped when dementia started setting in after his wife passed and he followed her. What might the world look like today if Faggin had used his founding role at Intel to introduce imaginary logic VLSI tools there? On Sun, Jul 5, 2020 at 12:32 PM James Bowery <jabow...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Sun, Jul 5, 2020 at 11:09 AM Ben Goertzel <b...@goertzel.org> wrote: > >> As you perhaps know I am a big fan of imaginary logic, having started in >> this direction due to some correspondences w/ Lou Kauffmann (G. Spencer >> Brown's collaborator) in the mid-1980s ... >> > > I'm not at all surprised which is why I said NOR DCGs should ring all > kinds of bells with you. But I am a _bit_ surprised I don't find you on > the Laws of Form yahoo group mailing list, which I administer (although > that mailing list is not very active). > > Lou Kauffman is prolific but has not, to the best of my knowledge, pursued > Tom's construction of imaginary logics from real valued spinors. I know he > and Tom were very well acquainted because I had dinner with him at Tom's > house in Palo Alto circa 2000, and Tom was the original editor of the > Alternative Natural Philosophy West's journal, in which Lou published some > articles. Lou told me that he didn't think my "obsession" with "time" was > on target regarding imaginary logic -- which struck me as quite odd given > his obvious affinity for GS Brown. However, this may have been due to the > general trend among the LoF folks to place "distinction" as prior to both > time and space -- with a kind of "space time" emerging without priority. > Under Tom's notion of a kind of negative valued quantum logic in which > imaginary logic is only one kind of "spinor", I can see why they may take > that view. But if so, I would have expected Lou to pursue Tom's quantum > logic. But I remain suspicious of such impartiality between space and > time. Sure, quantum laws are symmetric in time and space. Yet we > literally "observe" time (thence space) into "existence" in the sense that > observation itself breaks the symmetry. Tom regarded "the collapse of the > wave function" consequent to "observation" to be tortured metaphysical > nonsense. I never quite groked that. My understanding of Tom's > metaphysics is inadequate. > > However as you probably also know, type theory is now far beyond its roots >> w/ Russell & Whitehead etc., and there are type-theoretic treatments of >> Anti-Foundational Set Theory and so forth... one could use type-checking on >> quantifier logic extensions of imaginary logic etc. ... >> > > Yes and I haven't followed that work so my understanding is also > inadequate to critique it. However, the development of the field strikes > me as analogous to trying to come up with a dynamical mode of description > in terms of kinematics: Newton in terms of epicycles. > > *** >> In other words, trying to represent physical dimensions in the theory of >> types is getting the cart before the horse. You have to go back to the >> foundation of logic and build up from there to discover that computation is >> a dynamical system involving imaginary logic, and that "typing" is merely >> checking that two "objects" have commensurable dimensions (ie: they possess >> matching relational substructures required by a given operator). >> *** >> >> Sure, that makes sense. I.e. of course you can represent >> physical dimensions etc. in type theory in various ways, but if I >> understand correctly, what you're suggesting is a more foundational >> approach that will build up to certain particular types that are important >> for physics and mind in a structured and rational way... >> > > Yes. As I alluded above, it seems to me that the formal foundation of > computation, thence the theory of computation, thence AIT, thence notions > of intelligence, would benefit from a metaphysics derived from attempts to > make sense of physics in terms of some sort of quantum logic. > > >> A question in terms of AGI systems design is whether this sort of >> foundational thinking on specific types and structures etc. needs to be >> part of the infrastructure of one's system, or whether one can/should have >> a more generalized infrastructure and use it for research/experimentation >> on specific types and structures... >> > > Well I'm rather partial to formal tools which enable us to think about > "the empirical world" (using Russell's term) so that attempts at a "top > down theory of universal intelligence" like AIXI, are more consilient with > Reality. > > ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T044a258b4a99cfd7-M946699240fea593e315c8b62 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
