The problem with traditional logic and a logical approach to AI is that logic is inherently reductive. This was a theme in postmodern philosophy and the connectionism movement in AI research. Basically we don’t really make decisions through logic but through contextual mediation. (see Jeremy Campbell’s Impossible Machine and Paul Cilliers’ Complexity and Postmodernism).
All systems come up against the same problems. We are not modelling a real world through simulation since every world is just a model of other models, other projected spaces.
The “thing in itself” of modern philosophy is a misunderstanding. There is no thing in itself except as a timeless abstraction. So set theory, which logic depends on, needs to be given a deeper contextual, relational basis. This has been done by category theory, which is rapidly emerging as the best logical modelling framework.
This isn’t to say AI is impossible. It just has a problem rooting itself in more fundamental layers of the relational nexus. It becomes parasitic on organic life, which is WAY more complex than any system can be that is not based on some level of quantum coherence. Life can create new systems and connections on deeper and deeper layers as it grows in coherence. AI, like logic itself, needs the contexts of life to express itself. I think the Matrix gets that right, that there is a deep connection between machines, logical programs and spirits. they all are versions of the same thing; they all need life to express themselves.
Deleuze sometimes calls the virtual world the “machinic phylum”, basically a bunch of programs. Spiritualists have called the inner worlds the “typal” worlds. It is not just ideal abstract types, but real running programs cutting across all systems as their constitutive functions. I like Seth’s “museum of time”.
All models in all times are constantly being reinterpreted, relived, and redeployed in new contexts. Every person is an ancient model of the universe reanimated with the projections from your position in the “matrix” with all the “agents” of your relational nexus, your background of machinic spirits. By assuming a place in time and space you preference a certain position that necessitates that broken symmetry be experienced in a sequential line of time. Through that time of life, the model grows like any idea grows as it is used. I believe algorithmic logic and any system or life based on it like an AI, without a base in layers of contextual orientation built up through aeons of spiritual and physical evolution, cannot create new layers of time and so must control it to survive.
To simplify the logic problem as I illustrate more fully in “What Could Have Been Otherwise”: no formal rule or system can tell you what is really going on. Wisdom is the ability to contextualize things creatively according to the ends you want to achieve. And wisdom comes through experience. Organisms come packed with aeons of experience that they unpack and understand through living. They can “beat” the uncertainty principle because they are part of the creative “spiritual” force that is creating the world, not just another program trying to model or control it. Basically, Morpheus telling Neo he can beat the machines because he can transcend his programming.
