RE: SUO: Re: Logic & Programming Languages
-----Original Message-----
From: Leo Obrst [mailto:lobrst@mitre.org]
Sent: Saturday, July 21, 2001 6:04 PM
To: John F. Sowa
Cc: Seth Russell; Jon Awbrey; cg@cs.uah.edu;
standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org
Subject: Re: SUO: Re: Logic & Programming Languages
I tend to agree with John, as far as I can discern your original issues.
Much (most?) of what humans and other animals do are based on logical
inferential processes, it seems to me (although this is disfavored in
many literatures). Have these been compiled down to very quick
responses? Yes. So one doesn't have to infer at run-time: jump from the
set of premises to the conclusion (through the long intermediate chains,
which have been compiled away) and run from the tiger.
By the way, I am very interested in these knowledge compilation issues.
I view logic and math (anecdotally) as the self-organized spikes in our
neural nets. If they are real, that really does tell us something about
our universe.
Leo
"John F. Sowa" wrote:
>
> Seth,
>
> I would like to give an answer to your closing statement:
>
> > Logic is Great ... survival is better.
>
> But no animal can survive without being logical. When a bird or a mouse
> flees from a cat, it is being logical. When a dog begs for food when
> it is hungry, it is being logical. When a deer goes to a spring or
> a river when it is thirsty, it is being logical.
>
> To survive, an animal must be logical.
>
My view is that most animal behavior is logical, not that animals are being
logical in their behavioral decisions.
It is logical that the animal would seek water when it is thirsty, but the
animal is not using logical reasoning to move from a sense of thirst to its
seeking of water. The same can be said for most animal survival patterns.
There are separate issues when we deal with the procedure of why certain
macaques started washing their rice.
John H. Dickert
DTIC-OCQ
jdickert@dtic.mil
(703) 767-9014
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