Good hypothesis, here is why I don’t think it’s likely to be true.
It seems to me that when humans make explicit arguments with written language, we are doing a natural language form of knowledge representation. In science and philosophy the process of making conceptual models explicit is very useful for theory formulation and evaluation. i.e., In conceptual domains, human thinkers don’t learn like today’s neural nets, we don’t just immerse ourselves in a sea of raw numbers and absorb the correlations. We might do something like that on the perceptual level, but with scientific and philosophical thought, we are able to abstract over experience and explicitly formulate hypotheses, theories, and arguments. We name patterns to form concepts, and then we reason about these concepts. We make arguments to contextualize and interpret the significance of observations.
All of these operations of human thinking involve a natural language version of knowledge representation. But natural language is imprecise and it doesn’t scale well. It is transmitted through books and articles that pile up as information silos. I’m not saying we can or should eliminate natural language from intellectual inquiry, it will always have a role, but my question is why haven’t we supplemented it with a formal knowledge representation system designed for human thinkers.
Good hypothesis, here is why I don’t think it’s likely to be true.
It seems to me that when humans make explicit arguments with written language, we are doing a natural language form of knowledge representation. In science and philosophy the process of making conceptual models explicit is very useful for theory formulation and evaluation. i.e., In conceptual domains, human thinkers don’t learn like today’s neural nets, we don’t just immerse ourselves in a sea of raw numbers and absorb the correlations. We might do something like that on the perceptual level, but with scientific and philosophical thought, we are able to abstract over experience and explicitly formulate hypotheses, theories, and arguments. We name patterns to form concepts, and then we reason about these concepts. We make arguments to contextualize and interpret the significance of observations.
All of these operations of human thinking involve a natural language version of knowledge representation. But natural language is imprecise and it doesn’t scale well. It is transmitted through books and articles that pile up as information silos. I’m not saying we can or should eliminate natural language from intellectual inquiry, it will always have a role, but my question is why haven’t we supplemented it with a formal knowledge representation system designed for human thinkers.