[HN Gopher] Aristotle influenced the computer (2017)
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Aristotle influenced the computer (2017)
Author : conanxin
Score : 24 points
Date : 2022-10-01 01:04 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| ogogmad wrote:
| My understanding is that Aristotelian logic could only operate
| with statements of the form: - All x are y
| - Some x are y - Not all x are y - No x are y
|
| You could only substitute names for x and y, and there was no
| recursion. As a result, you couldn't express gometric and number-
| theoretic statements in this language.
|
| The method of argumentation was syllogism, which is not much more
| sophisticated than: All men are mortal. All
| philosophers are men. So all philosophers are mortal.
|
| This is limited compared to Natural Deduction. I thought it was
| Stoic logic that was a lot closer to modern propositional logic.
| There appear to be traces of predicate logic in the Aristotelian
| system - making it original in a different way from the Stoic
| system - but only slight ones because of the absence of
| recursion.
|
| I should say I haven't read the article. Busy.
| fedeb95 wrote:
| The article cites exactly the Aristotelian syllogism. I agree
| the title is a bit clickbaity, but I found it well written and
| explaining well how we got to computers since Greek times
| macrolocal wrote:
| Also, "all x are y" presupposes the existence of an x in
| Aristotelian logic.
| ogogmad wrote:
| No. By "x" I mean some predicate. For instance, x is "men".
| adrian_b wrote:
| Stoic logic was much later than Aristotle.
|
| The article traces the development of symbolic logic since
| Aristotle, whose work is the oldest preserved in this domain,
| through the time, until George Boole and Gottlob Frege in the
| 19th century and Claude Shannon in the 20th century, when
| logical operations became mapped to electrical circuits with
| relays.
|
| So it is right for any history of logic to start with
| Aristotle. If there have been older treatises on logic, they
| have been lost.
|
| It is not surprising that the successors of Aristotle have made
| some improvements upon his theory, it is more surprising that
| the improvements were so few until the 19th century, despite
| the fact that logic has been all the time an important object
| of study for all cultivated people, being rightfully one of the
| 3 branches of the trivium.
|
| Of course a title about "How Aristotle has created the
| computer" is completely wrong, because the creation of the
| electronic computers had multiple equally important sources,
| and the implementation of logic operations with relay circuits
| was only one of those many sources. Those multiple sources had
| separate histories that merged only around WW2, and some of
| those histories had also stretched over several centuries. Of
| equal importance for the genesis of the electronic computers
| were the mechanical arithmetic calculating machines and the
| electronic counters (invented in 1931 to count the pulses
| produced by the detectors of cosmic rays or of nuclear
| radiation).
| ogogmad wrote:
| > Stoic logic was much later than Aristotle.
|
| I think it got lost and largely forgotten after the collapse
| of the Western Roman Empire, while the Aristotelian system
| got preserved. Amusingly enough, one 19th century philosopher
| opined that Stoic logic was "dullness, triviality, and
| scholastic quibbling" and he welcomed the fact that the works
| of Chrysippus were no longer extant. See here:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoic_logic
| adrian_b wrote:
| I believe that the association of Stoic logic with Stoicism
| might have been the cause for it being forgotten.
|
| The early Christians viewed both Stoicism and Epicureanism
| as competitors, so after they obtained the power in the
| Roman Empire they have made efforts to discredit and
| persecute anyone and anything associated with those 2
| philosophies.
|
| On the other hand, Aristotle and Plato were more distant in
| the past and more disconnected from the then current
| political issues, so they were not perceived as threats and
| their study continued without impediments.
| ogogmad wrote:
| It's much more likely that preserving literature had
| become less affordable following the collapse of the
| Western Roman Empire. In the past, books were written on
| perishable material, and needed to be copied down to
| survive. The copying was tedious, labour-intensive, and
| expensive. Without the Roman bureaucracy, I don't see how
| many books could've survived. This is much more likely to
| be the reason than some deliberate conspiracy be evil,
| totalitarian Christians.
|
| Blaming Christianity is lazy tripe. The Catholic and
| Orthodox Churches actually helped to preserve a lot of
| classical literature.
| llaolleh wrote:
| What a bottom tier article. Writing is all over the place.
|
| Aristotle influenced the computer is like saying there is oxygen
| in the air.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| I've read half of the article, and of course, the title is
| sensationalizing: if anything, it was Leibniz with his "calculus
| ratiocinator" who influenced the computer, not Aristotle.
| taylorlapeyre wrote:
| Confusing piece. By its logic, Aristotle also "influenced"
| quantum physics. We all of course stand on the shoulders of
| giants, but given the rate of development of computing in the
| last 100 years, claiming that its ideas originated 2,300 years
| ago doesn't contribute much to understanding of what is going on.
| foysavas wrote:
| Th article traces the development of computers back through the
| development of symbolic logic.
|
| It may seem silly to connect to such ancient history, but the
| path from then to now has left a large backlog for future
| technologists to resurface.
| uwagar wrote:
| if u look at any popular science book on almost any topic,
| aristotle would have been the first to study that topic.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| Hard to believe. The first to write down his thoughts on it,
| maybe.
| haspoken wrote:
| https://archive.ph/QyBVJ
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