Aristotle influenced the computer (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Aristotle influenced the computer (2017)

theatlantic.com

39 pointsconanxin23 comments

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.

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

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).

> 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

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.

It is much more likely that the preservation of literature had become less affordable following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. In the past, books were written on perishable material and had 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 have survived. This is far more likely to be the reason than a deliberate effort by some fanatical Christians.

Synthesis: it can be both. Less interest in stoic because of political reasons, less chance over the centuries someone cares about keeping the stoic logic text around.

Also, "all x are y" presupposes the existence of an x in Aristotelian logic.

No. By "x" I mean some predicate. For instance, x is "men".

Yes. You can read more about the particular issue I'm raising here:

https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/42291/does-th...

In particular, one reads premises with existential import, slightly at odds with modern usage.

Oh, that's interesting. Thank you.

Most philosophers were foundational to the idea of "computing". They all build upon each other's ideas. Aristotle definitely started the work on logic, but Descartes made the modern "computer" definition.

This term has roots for an old occupation even: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)

You took equations and processed them. The reasoning that Descartes later reduced to the idea of "computation". Also known as Cartesian grammar - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_linguistics

The idea being that if we can make our minds into purely computational machines, then we will achieve certainty in our beliefs, thus relieving the anxiety we are suffering.

Hobbes later would try to define a new model of "cognition is computation".

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.

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.

IIRC Ada Lovelace said about the difference engine that "the remnant may be construed as arithmetical or logical, depending as the supply is construed" which always struck me as a pretty succinct statement of the fundamental theorem of computer science

And for that matter Jacquard in some cases used the punch-holes as control commands for later wefts, which though he never articulated it is the same principle.

So Jacquard was a PHP programmer or hacker just doing what had to be done to make the thing work, and Lovelace was a computer scientist. :)

What a bottom tier article. Writing is all over the place.

Aristotle influenced the computer is like saying there is oxygen in the air.

if u look at any popular science book on almost any topic, aristotle would have been the first to study that topic.

Hard to believe. The first to write down his thoughts on it, maybe.

another view is any further east beyond greece makes the origin of the said science eastern.

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.

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