Reality
I came to be comfortable saying that, to the mind, reality is an impression of inertia (3f0ca075). This could be an anti-realist statement.
Normativity
Which one is more dangerous, dogma or indulgence in free thought?
非形式化的判断
形式化是坚持让人的判断背书自动化判断的一种努力，这是 symbolic AI 的宗旨。不应该反过来断言形式化是它的唯一方法。AI 伦理的要求之一是可解释性，意思或许是 AI 到底只是一个复杂的机器，替人做出等价的推理，而不准产出任何人不能理解的、人的语言不能涵盖的推理。就算放弃伦理标准，这在哲学考验下站得住脚吗？什么才算人的判断背书了自动化判断？只能事后（拿到自动化推理结果）解释，可既然东西不是形式化的，任何推理的事后解释和事前解释也许根本不能相提并论，就算同一人连续做这两步也不一样。
Non-formal Judgements
Formalization is an effort to, resolutely, back up automated judgements with human judgements. This is a tenet of symbolic AI. We shall not conversely assert that formalization is the only way (to back up automated judgements.) One of the ethic requirements for AI is explainability. This might mean that AI is simply a complicated machine making equivalent inferences on behalf of humans, while we prohibit what a human cannot understand or what human language cannot convey. If we skip the ethics part for now, was the above philosophically sound? What counts as an automated inference backed up by human inference? It can only be articulated after the fact (after obtaining the automated inference results,) but perhaps if the subject is not formalized, any post-hoc explanations might not be considered comparable to pre-hoc explanations, not even if the same person produced these two explanations consecutively.
That Conway Paper
In the past month I realized the great significance of this paper, which had been sleeping in my reading list for 5 months. (The title looked distasteful to me: “Committees”, “How to invent”.) I invite everyone to read just the enlightening examples in it. Consider poststructuralism, and why making people conform to software often doesn’t work.
Examples. A contract research organization had eight people who were to produce a COBOL and an ALGOL compiler. After some initial estimates of difficulty and time, five people were assigned to the COBOL job and three to the ALGOL job. The resulting COBOL compiler ran in five phases, the ALGOL compiler ran in three.
Two military services were directed by their Commander-in-Chief to develop a common weapon system to meet their respective needs. After great effort they produced a copy of their organization chart.
Conway, How Do Committees Invent?