Cornflowers – Too Blue for Logic

My axioms were so clean-hewn,
The joins of ‘thus’ and ‘therefore’ neat –

But, I admit
Life would not fit
Between straight lines
And all the cornflowers said was ‘blue,’
All summer long, so blue.
So when the sea came in and with one wave
Threatened to wash my edifice away –

I let it.

“Cornflowers” by Marianne Jones

[via James (Gerry) Gerard-Wolff]

Too true – need to work on this dichotomy between the real-world logic and complexity with all it’s emergent semantics and properties and the human rationalisation towards simple syntax and neat rhetorical “logic”. Rational and Logical are becoming overloaded words !

Previously:

Jan 2002: BCS Cybernetics SIG, Cognition and Quantum Computing

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Post Notes:

Jan 2003 – I have a long standing “Computation / Rationalisation as Compression” reference to Wolff’s pages on “SP” and “Compression” on my resources pages – but avoided further direct reference due to the activist politics, but this remains an interesting resource. What does Wolff make of Lomborg, I wonder ? I see Wolff presented recently at the BCS special interest group on AI at Peterhouse Cambridge (10th/12th Dec 2002) – the plot thickens. Wolff makes references to early Pinker and reacts against Chomsky’s “language is too complicated to simulate” stuff.

Sept 2023 – I notice Gerry is still active with his “SP” Theory.

Aside – fascinating in the Jan 2003 note above I refer from Jan 2002 to Jan 2003 as “long-standing” – little did I know 🙂

S for Simplicity … as in compressing redundancy out of any information.
P for Power … as in maintaining / optimising its explanatory value.

And with his cognitionresearch.org domain still active too, and as recently as February 2023 a paper published in MDPI:

The SP Theory of Intelligence – and Its Realisation in the SP Computer Model, as a Foundation for the Development of Artificial General Intelligence
– by J. Gerrard Wolff.

Sadly the BCS-Cybernetics SIG (British Computer Society – Special Interest Group) on Cybernetics and Fundamental / Quantum Information, which first introduced me to people like David Deutsch, Brian Josephson, Peter Marcer and Peter Rowlands as well as Gerry Wolff became defunct, and they recently suggested their AI-SIG would be most appropriate to resurrect such interests?

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