It was a time before LSTMs or Transformers, a time before Pearlian Causal Graphs, a time before computers.
Indeed, it was even a time before Frege or Bayes. It was a time and place where even arabic numerals had not yet memetically infected the minds of people to grant them the powers of swift and easy mental arithmetic, and where non-syllabic alphabets (with distinct consonants and vowels) were still kinda new...
...in that time, someone managed to get credit for inventing the formalization of the syllogism! And he had a whole school for people to get naked and talk philosophy with each other. And he took the raw material of a simple human boy, and programmed that child into a world conquering machine whose great act of horror was to sack Thebes. (It is remarkable how many philosophers are “causally upstream, though a step or two removed” from giant piles of skulls. Hopefully, the “violent tragedy part” can be avoided this time around.)
Libertinism, logic, politics, and hypergraphia were his tools. His name was Aristotle. (Weirdly, way more people name their own children after the person-shaped-machine who was programmed to conquer the world, rather than the person-shaped programmer. All those Alexes and Alexandras, and only a very few Aristotles.)
It was a time before LSTMs or Transformers, a time before Pearlian Causal Graphs, a time before computers.
Indeed, it was even a time before Frege or Bayes. It was a time and place where even arabic numerals had not yet memetically infected the minds of people to grant them the powers of swift and easy mental arithmetic, and where non-syllabic alphabets (with distinct consonants and vowels) were still kinda new...
...in that time, someone managed to get credit for inventing the formalization of the syllogism! And he had a whole school for people to get naked and talk philosophy with each other. And he took the raw material of a simple human boy, and programmed that child into a world conquering machine whose great act of horror was to sack Thebes. (It is remarkable how many philosophers are “causally upstream, though a step or two removed” from giant piles of skulls. Hopefully, the “violent tragedy part” can be avoided this time around.)
Libertinism, logic, politics, and hypergraphia were his tools. His name was Aristotle. (Weirdly, way more people name their own children after the person-shaped-machine who was programmed to conquer the world, rather than the person-shaped programmer. All those Alexes and Alexandras, and only a very few Aristotles.)