thinking about what a world would look like where Leibniz's philosophical dream was real and one could actually calculate more things with formal logic than is possible here
@KitRedgrave I'm not sure I follow this: do you mean about representation or about logic, or calculation, or what?
@Eve looking at it, it was more like represent knowledge symbolically, and then do calculation on that knowledge
@KitRedgrave I'm wondering what a world would look like where we could do a more extensive or better representation/calculation than here; would we find significant differences at our current levels of mental capacity, or would they only show up at "bigger" levels? maybe AI would be one domain, actually.
@Eve that was kind of my hope. it would definitely change how AI works and it would have been adopted and improved much faster than now. there's a lot of cool stuff that could happen.
@KitRedgrave though I would have thought that current logic and symbolic representation in AI was something supposed to realize the leibniz program, but it wasnt fully successful and that's why there's so much statistical stuff going on now (actually I wonder what L would have thought about statistical inference)
@Eve I think what it was is that it was way oversold, didn't deliver on the unrealistic promises, and kind of died off for a while. And then the elements of it that were good got absorbed into the standard toolkit that programmers have, so now expert systems and AI based on rules are just kind of old hat.
But if it had actually happened, the cool shit that would happen...
@KitRedgrave I want to hear more 😃
@KitRedgrave sounds a bit related to that Gibson and Sterling novel the Difference Engine, though here the muse is Ada Lovelace rather than Leibniz. Have you read it?
@Eve i haven't but i have had someone else tell me about it earlier. definitely should read it
@Eve well, in my imaginings we would have had computing machines way earlier than we had in the past, and I can imagine something like Cybersyn using telegraphs and steam-powered thinking machines taking up whole buildings