Working through it now - reading the Laws of Thought by George Boole was a spiritual experience for me. The connection between natural language, logic, and math finally made sense to me. Before I had a hard time understanding the saliency of things like…
> 奇点几乎肯定会被一个机器智能只有 0.01%（比方说）的世界所先导 我不确定分数式的智能说得通。否则，Boole 的《思维规律》（The Laws of Thought）、钟表装置之类的机械、甚至书籍、甚至计数，以及许多其他想法，都会被看作捕捉了某种“分数”的智能。我认为这是一个阈值，就像图灵等价：要么你能……
> a singularity would almost surely be preceded by a world in which machines are 0.01% intelligent (say) I'm not sure that fractional intelligence makes sense. Otherwise, Boole's Laws of Thought, mechanisms like clockwork, even books, even counting, and many other ideas would be seen as capturing some "fraction" of intelligence. I think it's a threshold, like Turing equivalence: either you can…
…fundamental, because, a machine built to flip a coin with always the same pressure, can be adjusted to always give heads, or tails. In such a setup there won't be probability. From George Boole's The Laws of Thought, p.244: "Probability is expectation founded upon partial knowledge. A perfect acquaintance with _all_ the circumstances affecting the occurence of an event would change expectation into certainty, and…
People forget that Alan Turing's essay "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" was published in Mind, a major philosophy journal. People forget that Boolean algebra comes from a work called "The Laws of Thought," where Boole tries to describe the algebraic operations underlying thought. If you think that isn't something "philosophers do," this is an ancient goal stretching back to Aristotle's logic, up through…
…effort to distill the essence of what humans (regular, average people) find reasonable and convincing. (To mention just one example, there is a reason one of George Boole's major works is called "The Laws of Thought".) Our strategies for understanding language also involve inference and unification that is similar to logic programming. This is not to say the exact semantics and evaluation strategy of Prolog is what…
以为写 Haskell 必须先学“范畴论”，就好比说写个 if 条件语句必须先去读乔治·布尔1854年的《思维规律的研究》一样。换句话说，根本没那必要。“范畴论”是给数学家以及对高度抽象的数学理论感兴趣的人准备的。它并不能帮你……
Thinking that you need to learn "Category Theory" in order write Haskell is like saying you need to read George Boole's 'Investigation of the Laws of Thought' (1854) in order to write a conditional statement. In other words, it's not. "Category Theory" is for mathematicians and people interested in highly abstract mathematical theory. It doesn't help you…
正在啃这本书——读乔治·布尔的《思维规律》对我来说简直是一场精神洗礼。自然语言、逻辑和数学之间的联系终于在我脑子里通了。在这之前我一直很难理解像……这类事物的核心意义。
Working through it now - reading the Laws of Thought by George Boole was a spiritual experience for me. The connection between natural language, logic, and math finally made sense to me. Before I had a hard time understanding the saliency of things like…
> 奇点几乎肯定会被一个机器智能只有 0.01%（比方说）的世界所先导 我不确定分数式的智能说得通。否则，Boole 的《思维规律》（The Laws of Thought）、钟表装置之类的机械、甚至书籍、甚至计数，以及许多其他想法，都会被看作捕捉了某种“分数”的智能。我认为这是一个阈值，就像图灵等价：要么你能……
> a singularity would almost surely be preceded by a world in which machines are 0.01% intelligent (say) I'm not sure that fractional intelligence makes sense. Otherwise, Boole's Laws of Thought, mechanisms like clockwork, even books, even counting, and many other ideas would be seen as capturing some "fraction" of intelligence. I think it's a threshold, like Turing equivalence: either you can…
……根本性的，因为如果一台机器每次都用完全相同的力度去抛硬币，就能通过调整让它永远正面朝上，或者永远背面朝上。在这种设定下，根本就不存在概率。摘自乔治·布尔《思维规律》第244页：“概率是建立在不完全认知之上的期望。对影响事件发生之‘所有’情况的完全了解，将把期望转化为确定性，并且……”
…fundamental, because, a machine built to flip a coin with always the same pressure, can be adjusted to always give heads, or tails. In such a setup there won't be probability. From George Boole's The Laws of Thought, p.244: "Probability is expectation founded upon partial knowledge. A perfect acquaintance with _all_ the circumstances affecting the occurence of an event would change expectation into certainty, and…
大家都忘了艾伦·图灵那篇《计算机器与智能》是发表在顶尖哲学期刊《Mind》上的。大家也忘了布尔代数出自一本叫《思维规律》的书，布尔在里面试图描述思维背后的代数运算。如果你觉得这不是“哲学家该干的事”，那这个宏愿其实可以一直追溯到亚里士多德的逻辑学，再到……
People forget that Alan Turing's essay "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" was published in Mind, a major philosophy journal. People forget that Boolean algebra comes from a work called "The Laws of Thought," where Boole tries to describe the algebraic operations underlying thought. If you think that isn't something "philosophers do," this is an ancient goal stretching back to Aristotle's logic, up through…
……努力提炼出人类（普通大众）觉得合情合理且有说服力的本质。（随手举个例子，乔治·布尔的代表作之一之所以叫《思维规律》是有原因的。）我们理解语言的策略也涉及推断和合一（unification），这与逻辑编程非常相似。这并不是说 Prolog 精确的语义和求值策略就是……
…effort to distill the essence of what humans (regular, average people) find reasonable and convincing. (To mention just one example, there is a reason one of George Boole's major works is called "The Laws of Thought".) Our strategies for understanding language also involve inference and unification that is similar to logic programming. This is not to say the exact semantics and evaluation strategy of Prolog is what…
以为写 Haskell 必须先学“范畴论”，就好比说写个 if 条件语句必须先去读乔治·布尔1854年的《思维规律的研究》一样。换句话说，根本没那必要。“范畴论”是给数学家以及对高度抽象的数学理论感兴趣的人准备的。它并不能帮你……
Thinking that you need to learn "Category Theory" in order write Haskell is like saying you need to read George Boole's 'Investigation of the Laws of Thought' (1854) in order to write a conditional statement. In other words, it's not. "Category Theory" is for mathematicians and people interested in highly abstract mathematical theory. It doesn't help you…