Philosophers - Descartes - I think therefore i am

If anything what I'm sitting and what's happened since and a simply reinforced the feelings I had there and it was interesting the transformation that led me to write goodbye to your cart and it was very explicitly good by it to the sort of Cartesian logical based approach to life and in a sense I was finally renouncing my form of self because I went into mathematics I mean I thought I think I was ever sort of a total platenist but I went into mathematics seduced by the fact that of the fact of the power of the logic and the reasoning and in the 19th century mathematics rooms supreme it's a basis of physics, engineering, calculus, all other very economics and so forth so you know mathematics literally built the modern world so it's unbelievably powerful and it began by just astronomical reflections but it's power was phenomenal and we built in modern world using mathematics um to the degree where people in mathematics including myself began to think when we got this powerful mechanism we can take it into the realms of psychology, sociology, and linguistics and start to make sense of these soft sciences you know they're we can try to solve every problem no that had already been tried a few decades earlier by the people built child official intelligence systems and expert systems and in both cases they had limited but very limited success but not great success but you know undaunted by that I thought well we can maybe do it in natural language understanding language in processing so when Stanford founded it center for sort of language and information in 1983 I got very interested and came out as a visit in 85 came down and the cameras are an invited visitor for 85 to 87 became a member of CSLI and was doing all of this research and I came in thinking and all of this mathematics I've got really a lot to contribute to this this enterprise now what I didn't expect was that when I got to CSLI I would be brought face-to-face with all of these psychologists these linguists these psycholinguists these social linguists the sociologists the ethnomethanologist I was brought up with all of these people in what I used to call the soft sciences I suppose to the hard sciences and thinking you know I mean I wasn't so naive that I think I would be able to say here's some mathematics it will make your discipline more more robust or some of my colleagues seem to have that belief but what I I was prepared to sort of be taught new things what I wasn't prepared for but what I happened to me was I ended up realizing the huge limitations on mathematics in those domains I mean they are phenomenal limitations when we write down and this happened to Chomsky when he tried to sort of do the center of linguistics in the 50s it became clear that there were it was good stuff and lots of stuff has come out of it but it wasn't coming close it was like trying to reach the moon by building taller and taller ladders that was not the way did mean to say you wouldn't get to the moon but you were going to get there by building a ladder and building the ladder that got us to the moon certainly involved a lot of mathematics and building the ladder that will involve us to understanding the sort of to sort of really understanding people in society mathematics can certainly play a role but it's not the rule of the king and lord that it was in physics it's the rule of of a trusted worker who can provide stuff as and when it's needed and and I realized just how complex these the the problems that were being grappled up by the by the social and human sciences so part of my recognition of that was writing good body of cat trying to articulate why I thought it was we needed to stop trying to build mathematical ladders that would help us reach this moon of of understanding and of a human beings in society and simply view mathematics as a tool that could play a useful role in a more broad and holistic discipline of a study interdisciplinary study that would help us to understand it and and one by one and a lot of a lot of a lot but a substantial number of mathematicians have began to sort of make that recognition and along with that came in my case the final acknowledgement that mathematics isn't the discovery of an external platonic realm then it's actually the building and study of a realm within our own minds so it's a social construct