ksvanhorn comments on Timeless Beauty - Less Wrong
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Your criticism seems off the mark to me. These AI researchers were trying to automate reasoning. They turned to formal logic, which makes perfect sense -- formal logic is just highly disciplined reasoning, so disciplined that a computer can check it. If you're using formal logic, of course your symbols don't mean anything of themselves; all the meaning is in the axioms, a.k.a. the symbols' network of connections to each other.
A better criticism would be that they stuck to deductive logic -- which only tells you when you can know something with absolute certainty -- and took decades to realize that most of the useful real-world knowledge was probabilistic. One can't formalize the concept of an apple because it is not well-defined, anymore than a blegg is.