The Stoics, as we saw, also shrank the soul’s domain to that of reason. But Aristotle’s view on reason is tempered by his belief that sensory impressions are the currency, or language, of thought. (The Epicureans, the rivals of the Stoics, believed sensory experience—what contemporary philosophers call
qualia
—rather than intellectual thought, to be the distinguishing feature of beings with souls.) But Plato seemed to want as little to do with the actual, raw experience of the world as possible, preferring the relative perfection and clarity of abstraction, and, before him, Socrates spoke of how a mind that focused too much on sense experience was “drunk,” “distracted,” and “blinded.” 9
Descartes, in the seventeenth century, picks up these threads and leverages the mistrust of the senses toward a kind of radical skepticism: How do I know my hands are really in front of me? How do I know the world actually exists? How do I know that
I
exist?
His answer becomes the most famous sentence in all of philosophy.
Cogito ergo sum
. I think, therefore I am.
I
think
, therefore I am—not “I register the world” (as Epicurus might have put it), or “I experience,” or “I feel,” or “I desire,” or “I recognize,” or “I sense.” No. I
think
. The capacity furthest
away
from lived reality is that which assures us of lived reality—at least, so says Descartes.
This is one of the most interesting subplots, and ironies, in the story of AI, because it was deductive logic, a field that Aristotle helped invent, that was the very first domino to fall.
Logic Gates
It begins, you might say, in the nineteenth century, when the English mathematician and philosopher George Boole works out and publishes a system for describing logic in terms of conjunctions of three basic operations: AND, OR, 10 and NOT. The idea is that you begin with any number of simple statements, and by passing them througha kind of flowchart of ANDs, ORs, and NOTs, you can build up and break down statements of essentially endless complexity. For the most part, Boole’s system is ignored, read only by academic logicians and considered of little practical use, until in the mid-1930s an undergraduate at the University of Michigan by the name of Claude Shannon runs into Boole’s ideas in a logic course, en route to a mathematics and electrical engineering dual degree. In 1937, as a twenty-one-year-old graduate student at MIT, something clicks in his mind; the two disciplines bridge and merge like a deck of cards. You can implement Boolean logic
electrically
, he realizes, and in what has been called “the most important master’s thesis of all time,” he explains how. Thus is born the electronic “logic gate”—and soon enough, the processor.
Shannon notes, also, that you might be able to think of
numbers
in terms of Boolean logic, namely, by thinking of each number as a series of true-or-false statements about the numbers that it contains—specifically, which powers of 2 (1, 2, 4, 8, 16 …) it contains, because every integer can be made from adding up at most one of each. For instance, 3 contains 1 and 2 but not 4, 8, 16, and so on; 5 contains 4 and 1 but not 2; and 15 contains 1, 2, 4, and 8. Thus a set of Boolean logic gates could treat them as bundles of logic, true and false, yeses and noes. This system of representing numbers is familiar to even those of us who have never heard of Shannon or Boole—it is, of course, binary.
Thus, in one fell swoop, the master’s thesis of twenty-one-year-old Claude Shannon will break the ground for the processor
and
for digital mathematics. And it will make his future wife’s profession—although he hasn’t met her yet—obsolete.
And it does more than that. It forms a major part of the recent history—from the mechanical logic gates of Charles Babbage through the integrated circuits in our computers today—that ends up amounting to a huge blow to humans’ unique claim to and
qualia
—rather than intellectual thought, to be the distinguishing feature of beings with souls.) But Plato seemed to want as little to do with the actual, raw experience of the world as possible, preferring the relative perfection and clarity of abstraction, and, before him, Socrates spoke of how a mind that focused too much on sense experience was “drunk,” “distracted,” and “blinded.” 9
Descartes, in the seventeenth century, picks up these threads and leverages the mistrust of the senses toward a kind of radical skepticism: How do I know my hands are really in front of me? How do I know the world actually exists? How do I know that
I
exist?
His answer becomes the most famous sentence in all of philosophy.
Cogito ergo sum
. I think, therefore I am.
I
think
, therefore I am—not “I register the world” (as Epicurus might have put it), or “I experience,” or “I feel,” or “I desire,” or “I recognize,” or “I sense.” No. I
think
. The capacity furthest
away
from lived reality is that which assures us of lived reality—at least, so says Descartes.
This is one of the most interesting subplots, and ironies, in the story of AI, because it was deductive logic, a field that Aristotle helped invent, that was the very first domino to fall.
Logic Gates
It begins, you might say, in the nineteenth century, when the English mathematician and philosopher George Boole works out and publishes a system for describing logic in terms of conjunctions of three basic operations: AND, OR, 10 and NOT. The idea is that you begin with any number of simple statements, and by passing them througha kind of flowchart of ANDs, ORs, and NOTs, you can build up and break down statements of essentially endless complexity. For the most part, Boole’s system is ignored, read only by academic logicians and considered of little practical use, until in the mid-1930s an undergraduate at the University of Michigan by the name of Claude Shannon runs into Boole’s ideas in a logic course, en route to a mathematics and electrical engineering dual degree. In 1937, as a twenty-one-year-old graduate student at MIT, something clicks in his mind; the two disciplines bridge and merge like a deck of cards. You can implement Boolean logic
electrically
, he realizes, and in what has been called “the most important master’s thesis of all time,” he explains how. Thus is born the electronic “logic gate”—and soon enough, the processor.
Shannon notes, also, that you might be able to think of
numbers
in terms of Boolean logic, namely, by thinking of each number as a series of true-or-false statements about the numbers that it contains—specifically, which powers of 2 (1, 2, 4, 8, 16 …) it contains, because every integer can be made from adding up at most one of each. For instance, 3 contains 1 and 2 but not 4, 8, 16, and so on; 5 contains 4 and 1 but not 2; and 15 contains 1, 2, 4, and 8. Thus a set of Boolean logic gates could treat them as bundles of logic, true and false, yeses and noes. This system of representing numbers is familiar to even those of us who have never heard of Shannon or Boole—it is, of course, binary.
Thus, in one fell swoop, the master’s thesis of twenty-one-year-old Claude Shannon will break the ground for the processor
and
for digital mathematics. And it will make his future wife’s profession—although he hasn’t met her yet—obsolete.
And it does more than that. It forms a major part of the recent history—from the mechanical logic gates of Charles Babbage through the integrated circuits in our computers today—that ends up amounting to a huge blow to humans’ unique claim to and
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