Stephen Wolfram
speaker
4,069 appearances
5 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2020
last heard 29 May
Stephen Wolfram’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 3.
Appearances
about language.
I mean, we kind of know that when we set up human language, we know that it has certain regularities.
We know that it has a certain grammatical structure, noun followed by verb, followed by noun, adjectives, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
That's its kind of grammatical structure.
But I think the thing that ChatGPT is showing us is that there's an additional kind of regularity to language, which has to do with the meaning of the language beyond just this pure part of speech combination type of thing.
And I think the one example of that that we've had in the past is logic.
And I think my picture of how was logic invented, how was logic discovered,
It really was a thing that was discovered in its original conception.
It was discovered, presumably by Aristotle, who kind of listened to a bunch of people, orators, giving speeches.
And this one made sense, that one doesn't make sense.
And you see these patterns of if...
the, you know, I don't know what, you know, if the Persians do this, then this does that, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And what Aristotle realized is there's a structure to those sentences.
There's a structure to that rhetoric that doesn't matter whether it's the Persians and the Greeks or whether it's the cats and the dogs.
It's just, you know, P and Q. You can abstract from the details of these particular sentences.
You can lift out this kind of formal structure, and that's what logic is.
The fact that there is an abstraction from natural language that has where you can fill in any word you want is a very interesting discovery.
Now, it took a long time to mature.
I mean, Aristotle had this idea of syllogistic logic,
where there were these particular patterns of how you could argue things, so to speak.
Showing 521–540 of 4,069 · page 27 of 204
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