@ Latanius: “FOPL is similar to the taxi driver who never visualizes anything. (It never dereferences the pointers.) I don’t think the solution would be a much better symbolic system (although FOPL is not really designed for dereferencig), but to connect a visual cortex to the symbol manipulation system. So the similarity of two symbols could be checked by simply visualizing them.”
Ok, and how do you visualize the concept “technology advances exponentially because technology feeds back positively on itself” or the concept “you can’t define a word any way you like because the definitions you choose will bias your thinking in subtle ways”, or even the concept of “status quo bias”
Not all concepts are amenable to useful analysis by the visual system. In fact, most of the concepts that are most useful (the general, abstract ones) are not amenable to this sort of analysis.
Futhermore, anyone who criticizes “symbolic” thinking would do well to read Marvin Minsky’s book, “The Emotion Machine”, in which he carefully explains why symbols are more useful then, say, connection strengths in a neural net, or (as you seem to be arguing for) pixel values in a bitmap image.
@ Latanius: “FOPL is similar to the taxi driver who never visualizes anything. (It never dereferences the pointers.) I don’t think the solution would be a much better symbolic system (although FOPL is not really designed for dereferencig), but to connect a visual cortex to the symbol manipulation system. So the similarity of two symbols could be checked by simply visualizing them.”
Ok, and how do you visualize the concept “technology advances exponentially because technology feeds back positively on itself” or the concept “you can’t define a word any way you like because the definitions you choose will bias your thinking in subtle ways”, or even the concept of “status quo bias”
Not all concepts are amenable to useful analysis by the visual system. In fact, most of the concepts that are most useful (the general, abstract ones) are not amenable to this sort of analysis.
Futhermore, anyone who criticizes “symbolic” thinking would do well to read Marvin Minsky’s book, “The Emotion Machine”, in which he carefully explains why symbols are more useful then, say, connection strengths in a neural net, or (as you seem to be arguing for) pixel values in a bitmap image.