Wity Stories: Ideas that thread through time{"series":{"name":"The Laws of Thought","slug":"the-laws-of-thought","tagline":"A chain of thought across 25 centuries.","desc":"The dream of understanding the language of human thought, pursued across centuries by minds that never met. Chasing it, they turned thought into symbols and rules, laid the groundwork for computing and AI, and discovered where it breaks.","cover":"https://ugc.wity.ai/transformed/1782923839475.jpg","episodes":[{"title":"Rules for Generating Language","character":"Pāṇini","period":"India, c. 600 BCE","slug":""},{"title":"The Instruments of Knowing","character":"Akṣapāda Gautama","period":"India, c. 500 BCE","slug":""},{"title":"Thought and Reality Are Isomorphic","character":"Aristotle","period":"Athens, c. 350 BCE","slug":""},{"title":"Enumerating in Binary","character":"Pingala","period":"India, c. 300 BCE","slug":""},{"title":"Formal Systems Are Inherently Insufficient","character":"Mandana Misra","period":"India, c. 700 CE","slug":"mandana-misra-formal-systems"},{"title":"Mental Operations Can Be Mechanical","character":"Blaise Pascal","period":"Paris, 1642–1652","slug":""},{"title":"The Alphabet of Human Thought","character":"Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz","period":"Hanover, 1679–1716","slug":"leibniz-characteristica-universalis","cover":"https://ugc.wity.ai/transformed/1782923839475.jpg"},{"title":"Thought Constructs What It Observes","character":"Immanuel Kant","period":"Königsberg, 1781–1790","slug":""},{"title":"Any Computation Can Be Mechanized","character":"Charles Babbage","period":"London, 1822–1871","slug":""},{"title":"Computation Manipulates Symbols, Not Just Numbers","character":"Ada Lovelace","period":"London, 1843","slug":""},{"title":"Reasoning Can Be Calculated","character":"George Boole","period":"Cork, 1847–1864","slug":""},{"title":"Thought Encodes Abstractions","character":"Ernst Mach","period":"Vienna, 1883–1905","slug":""},{"title":"All Thought Is Signs","character":"Charles Sanders Peirce","period":"Cambridge, MA, 1867–1914","slug":""},{"title":"The Language of Pure Thought","character":"Gottlob Frege","period":"Jena, 1879–1903","slug":""},{"title":"Every Mathematical Truth Can Be Proved","character":"David Hilbert","period":"Göttingen, 1900–1930","slug":""},{"title":"Any Consistent System Has Unprovable Truths","character":"Kurt Gödel","period":"Vienna & Princeton, 1931","slug":""},{"title":"All Computation Is Function Application","character":"Alonzo Church","period":"Princeton, 1936","slug":""},{"title":"Computation Has Limits","character":"Alan Turing","period":"Cambridge, 1936–1954","slug":""},{"title":"Meaning Is Use, Not Reference","character":"Ludwig Wittgenstein","period":"Cambridge, 1921–1953","slug":""},{"title":"Information Is Measurable, Independent of Meaning","character":"Claude Shannon","period":"Bell Labs, 1948","slug":""},{"title":"Intelligence Can Be Represented in Logic","character":"John McCarthy","period":"Dartmouth & Stanford, 1956–1984","slug":""},{"title":"Intelligence Is Physical Symbol Manipulation","character":"Allen Newell & Herbert Simon","period":"Carnegie Mellon, 1956–1976","slug":""},{"title":"Language Has Generative Structure — And Limits","character":"Noam Chomsky","period":"MIT, 1957–","slug":""},{"title":"The Concepts We Think In Are Inherently Gradated","character":"Lotfi Zadeh","period":"Berkeley, 1965–1973","slug":""},{"title":"Intelligence Is Not a Single Formal System","character":"Marvin Minsky","period":"MIT, 1969–1986","slug":"marvin-minsky-society-of-mind"},{"title":"Knowledge Is Distributed, Not Symbolic","character":"David Rumelhart","period":"San Diego, 1980–1986","slug":""},{"title":"Reasoning Requires Causal Models, Not Just Patterns","character":"Judea Pearl","period":"UCLA, 1988–2018","slug":""},{"title":"Thinking Is Navigation Through Reference Frames","character":"Jeff Hawkins","period":"Redwood City, 2004–2021","slug":"jeff-hawkins-reference-frames","draft":true},{"title":"Meaning Emerges from Absence, Not Presence","character":"Terrence Deacon","period":"Berkeley, 1997–2011","slug":""}]},"opts":{"showHeader":false,"showPeriod":false,"linkUnpublished":true,"compact":true}}
The Laws of Thought
The dream of understanding the language of human thought, pursued across centuries by minds that never met. Chasing it, they turned thought into symbols and rules, laid the groundwork for computing and AI, and discovered where it breaks.
29+ thinkers
3 available now