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Article 5757 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: nlc@media.mit.edu (Nick Cassimatis)
Subject: Re: penrose
Message-ID: <1992May20.010756.27980@news.media.mit.edu>
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References: <1992May8.015202.10792@news.media.mit.edu> <1992May18.194416.27171@hellgate.utah.edu> <1992May19.025328.5332@news.media.mit.edu>
Date: Wed, 20 May 1992 01:07:56 GMT
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In article <1992May19.025328.5332@news.media.mit.edu> minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes:
>In article <1992May18.194416.27171@hellgate.utah.edu> tolman%asylum.utah.edu@cs.utah.edu (Kenneth Tolman) writes:
>>In article <1992May8.015202.10792@news.media.mit.edu> minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes:
>>

>incomplete.  My point is simply, so what!  Because 
> > (1) There's no good reason to assume humans are consistent.  
> > (2) There's no reason to program a machine to be, either.  


Evidence that (1) is right is all over the place.  Here's a clear cut
example: if yo you assume that Frege believed in the axioms of his system,
then he believed something that was shown to be inconsistent.  Here's
another little argument: anyone logician before Godel who believed
logic to be consistent, was inconsistent.

Of course, even if human beings turned out to be consistent (which is
a ludicrous belief), would it be an interesting or insightful way to
think of them, study them and/or attempt to reproduce them?  I've
never seen any reason to think so.  Perhaps someone can explain to why
everyone thinks so.

>So I can't follow the remaining arguments.  They all slip into the
>usual commonsense arguments that humans can make infinite clusures of
>extensions, whereas machines can only do it step-by-step.  

While it does seem to me that this is common sense to most people, I
must say that I find this an unnatural and intuitive way of looking
people.  How could such a thing have become so common sense to
everyone?  (Question for those who find this commonsensical: did you
always find this so, or only after you read some logic or philosophy?)
The natural and only explanation for this outlook that I can come up
with is that through the tradition of logic in philosphy, thinkers
assumed that people really worked like this.  But this seems to miss
the point of much of that logic and philosophy.  My impression of it
is that logical epistemology was an endeavor to find normative
principles by which to decide what to believe.  It seems that when
people began to think seriously about the mind, they assumed that it
actually worked this way.  But this seems like assuming that
government is working perfectly today simply because the founding
fathers outlined the principles for what would constitute perfect
government!



