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by agarsev
1592 days ago
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In biology: morphology of organisms, evolution, ecology. And those deal with systems, so they use a lot of math. But interspersed with the math, you always find natural language descriptions, definitions, explanations, which are necessary for understanding and complete modelling of the theory. These make reference to the shared human experience of the world, and are not formalized in logic. Not that they cannot be, or at least so I hope. But we're very far from it today, that's what I mean. Maybe relatedly, humans think of the world in fuzzy terms. At some point we're going to need a system for formalizing fuzzy thought, and no, fuzzy logic is not it, because that's just a continuous extension to boolean logic. Human thinking is fuzzy beyond that. But, as a computational linguist, I sometimes worry that we already have that system: natural languages! |
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So take the original reaction of DNA from just inorganics, I typed those words, but have no reference for what the model actually is. What I do however have, is words for each of those things, and a set of impossibilities for what it could "not" mean.
However, the reference is not born out in terms of nothing, each of those words has a set of things that we do have models for, we have models for atoms, reactions, DNA, etc.
So in reality the sentence describes something that we simply can't point to specifics on, but is in no way "unexplainable" in terms of its logic.
Another example would be dark matter, we use those words, but really they just stand for a set of observations, empirical measurements just operating outside of the patterns we are used to, but certainly not without something to point to.
If there's some shared experience that we can't express logically, I'm at least personally unfamiliar with it, I would need some further understanding of what you have in mind.
I could also be wildly misreading what you mean, semantics are not my favorite over text.