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From: minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Subject: Re: Expressibility (was "Penrose's new book)
Message-ID: <1994Oct29.225104.8917@news.media.mit.edu>
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Cc: minsky
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References: <1994Oct26.172830.3987@oracorp.com> <1994Oct27.020638.28742@news.media.mit.edu> <783412036snz@campion.demon.co.uk>
Date: Sat, 29 Oct 1994 22:51:04 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu sci.logic:8749 comp.ai.philosophy:21492

In article <783412036snz@campion.demon.co.uk> rbj@campion.demon.co.uk writes:
>In article <1994Oct27.020638.28742@news.media.mit.edu>
>           minsky@media.mit.edu "Marvin Minsky" writes:
>
>> (See also Daryl's next message.)  In particular, when you try to
>> express commonsense ideas that happen to be self-referent you expose
>> yourself to diagnalization.  If it were more often understood how
>> pervasive this is, then computer science students would be more
>> suspicious of first order logic.  When do you need self-reference?
>> Certainly when you make up things like
>
>Why should computer science students be suspicious of first order logic?

Simply because you cannot include heuristics in the form of advice
about which kinds of assumptions of previous inferences ought or ought
not be used for various sorts of problem-solving situations.  Perhaps
I should have said "AI students" rather than CS students.  However, I
regard AI as the part of CS that ought to push the frontiers of
expressibility, etc.




