Math and Logic Cannot Create Minds
“My candour will be appreciated by everyone” What the Rules didn’t make explicit, however, was that Descartes was confronted with a major problem. This problem is central to his philosophy, and yet he was never able to resolve it: he had tried this method himself, he knew that it worked, but he could never explain why. It’s a problem that all mathe
... See moreDavid Bessis • Mathematica
All mathematics exhibits in its conclusions only what is already implicit in its premises,
Herbert A. Simon • The Sciences of the Artificial
“Thirty years ago, we used to ask: Can a computer simulate all processes of logic? The answer was yes, but the question was surely wrong. We should have asked: Can logic simulate all sequences of cause and effect? And the answer would have been no.”
― Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity
― Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity
Gregory Bateson Quotes (Author of Steps to an Ecology of Mind)
Then Godel’s theorem set similar limits to mathematics, the formal language of science. Mathematicians used to think that their language had some special inherent trueness that derived from the laws of logic. Now we know that what we call ‘reason’ is just an arbitrary game. It’s not special, in the way we thought it was.