Quo modo Deus exstat?

Michelangelo -The Creation  of Adam (Wikipedia)

Major is the family dog, recently taken to sheep-worrying/killing. The father will have to put it down. Owen, the godless younger brother, petitions his religious-curious older sister.

“'If you prayed for Major not to get shot would he not get shot?' said Owen in a demanding voice.

The thought of praying had never crossed my mind.

'You prayed you wouldn't have to thread the sewing machine any more and you didn't.'

I saw with dismay the unavoidable collision coming, of religion and life.

He got up and stood in front of me and said tensely, 'Pray. How do you do it? Start now!'

'You can't pray,' I said, 'about a thing like that.'

'Why not?'

Why not? Because, I could have said to him, we do not pray for things to happen or not happen, but for the strength and grace to bear what does. A fine way out, that smells abominably of defeat. But I did not think of it. I simply thought, and knew, that praying was not going to stop my father going out and getting his gun and calling, 'Major! Here, Major -' Praying would not alter that.”

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‘Age of Faith’, in ‘Lives of Girls and Women’, Alice Munro (p. 145).

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Aged ten, I ask my father if he believes in God. “No I don't,” he says, “There is no way heaven could be big enough for all the people it would need to contain.”

A parish meeting in Andover, a Q&A. Hesitantly, a parishioner asks the priest, “Father, where is heaven?” The priest, equally hesitant, talks about quantum theory and the strange spaces within the atom. I cringe with embarrassment.

Rod Liddle writes in his Sunday Times column about asking a CofE bishop whether he believes in God. “Blessed if I know, Rod,” comes the reply, confirming Liddle’s sardonic take on England's institutional religion.

A liberal states their deepest attachment and loyalty: to democracy and the rule of law. But in what sense do those things actually exist? I ask. They don't understand the question.

Buddhists believe that the self is an illusion.

Freighted, that term ‘illusion’.

It appears that Buddhists believe the self is a process, an epiphenomenon of more basic physical and mental state transitions. Is that what ‘illusion' means?

It's natural to think naively that existence is a simple, obvious notion. Stones exist, your body exists. If something exists, you can poke or paint it. But most ‘things’ we deal with in life are not like this: contracts, democracy, numbers, freedom, oppression, patriotism, any -ism. Welcome to the social construction of reality and the ubiquity of reification.

Catholicism is more a framework than a set of definite precepts. It's not reducible to biblical literalism. Orthodoxy will tell you that the true nature of God is mysterious. Most Catholics opt for some manner of ontological realism but I'm more deontological…

Having military skills is not exactly a predicate

In this recent post I looked at Prince Henry, a medieval warrior ruling a hermit kingdom who had the misfortune to be discovered - and fall out with - the Russians. Prince Henry's armoured cavalry did not fare well against Russian gunships, artillery, tanks and spetsnaz troops.

So did Prince Henry have military skills .. or not?

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This question masquerades as a property question. If we had asked whether Henry had red hair, we could define a predicate

red-haired(henry)

which would have the boolean value true or false. Similarly, it seems we are asking for the truth-value of the predicate:

has-military-skills(henry)

but that isn't right, because it doesn't capture the environmental context.

Instead we should write:

λx.has-military-skills(henry, x),

a boolean-valued function with dummy variable x which needs to be bound to a specific opponent before a truth value can be assigned. So

λx.has-military-skills(henry, x)(knight) = has-military-skills(henry, knight)

which evaluates to true.

λx.has-military-skills(henry, x)(russians) = has-military-skills(henry, russians)

which turns out to be false.

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This is the approach Richard Montague took in his natural language semantics.

Google Translate: English to predicate logic (please!)

Did you see the  "Missing: google"?

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A big problem with English (natural language really) is that it doesn't come equipped with an explicit set of inference rules. Consequently, when someone uses natural language to communicate with an AI system, it's not really possible for that system to immediately connect the utterance to its store of knowledge. If only natural languages were like formal languages, which have proper inference and well-defined semantics. The thought that secretly they are was the intuition of Richard Montague*. But he was misguided.

Any AI natural language understanding system tries to transform the raw material of human language into something it can use, something more inferentially tractable.  Usually that doesn't work too well, and even the latest statistical systems (which do well in surface-level speech-recognition and translation) show scant abilities to understand.

It's as well to remind ourselves just why natural languages are so unhelpful to AI designers. It's because they are a highly-optimised solution to a situated communications problem. Speech is a low-bandwidth, linear and slow channel for communicating time-critical thoughts. So speech is highly optimized to use every available constraint to speed up meaning transfer:

• volume, pitch, timbre and tone of voice
• shared and predictive knowledge of the conversational partner
• emotional cues
• physical gesturing and facial expressions
• environmental situation and context 
• ...

Researchers are quite aware of this, of course. The topic area is called Pragmatics and it's hived off as a separate sub-discipline .. because it seems to require way too much modelling of the conversing agents in their specific environment, culture and history. In short, it's too hard.

But by abstracting away these additional constraints which channel and constrain meaning, we make the semantic understanding problem way too hard. Which is why we can't solve it.

A Google Translate system which mapped between a natural language and a formal language (with well-defined inference rules and semantics) would nevertheless be a boon to the designers of conversational AI systems, including chatbots. But Google doesn't have a corpus of First-Order Predicate Calculus sentences translationally-linked to English, so its deep learning systems can't crunch the data and add FOPC to its list of languages. Projects such as Cyc have attempted to do this stuff by hand .. with surprisingly little impact.

Again the way forward is embodied robotics and human baby conversational emulation.

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* In a weird reprise of Alan Turing's fate, Wikipedia reports that Richard Montague 'died violently in his own home; the crime is unsolved to this day. Anita Feferman and Solomon Feferman argue that he usually went to bars "cruising" and bringing people home with him. On the day that he was murdered, he brought home several people "for some kind of soirée", but they instead robbed his house and strangled him.'

He was 40.