Rota, The Barrier of Meaning

06 Oct 2023 - 13 Sep 2025
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    • Ulam as prophet – see why that appeals to JFM
    • His critique of AI is not really on point for Minsky-AI, although probably for most AI it is valid – Agre made the same point in his essay on homunculus and orbiculus .
    • "When you perceive intelligently, as you sometimes do, you always perceive a function, never an object in the set-theoretic or physical sense. "Your Cartesian idea of a device in the brain that does the registering is based upon a misleading analogy between vision and photography. Cameras always register objects, but human perception is always the perception of functional roles. The two processes could not be more different
    • Logic formalizes only very few of the processes by which we think. The time has come to enrich formal logic by adding some other fundamental notions to it. What is it that you see when you see? You see an object as a key, you see a man in a car as a passenger, you see some sheets of paper as a book. It is the word "as' that must be mathematically formalized, on a par with the connectives "and,' 'or," 'implies,' and "not' that have already been accepted into a formal logic.
    • From the related essay on Fundierung
      • We come face to face with a fundamental problem: the problem of understanding what is to be meant by dependency of the content of what I read on the text that I read. This kind of dependency is called Fundierung. Content matters more than text, yet content exists less than text. There is no way the content may be said to "exist" unless one twists the word "existence" beyond recognition.
      • Argh seems like BS to me.