Hi, Frederik. Nobody received your posts intended for peirce-l, because your email address differs from how it appears at the peirce-l server. I just approved the emails for distribution and took the liberty of changing the server's record of your old email address to your current one. - Best regards, Ben Udell, co-manager, for himself and Gary Richmond, co-manager and moderator, PEIRCE-L.
On 12/18/2024 5:10 AM, Frederik Stjernfelt wrote:
Dear Gary R – Did you receive my below message? I was informed that deliverance to peirce-l was belated and my posting was returned by [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Best F Dear Mike, Gary, Tuezuen, list – This is a great idea. This would also explain why LLMs “hallucinate” so much as they do, as abduction is neither necessary (like deduction) nor probable (like induction). Peirce, of course, stresses that abduction is indeed the source of new ideas but that it offers no assurance of their truth which has to be established by ensuing investigation using de- and inductions. I have only experimented with the free versions of ChatGPT and they are, indeed, highly error-prone. I tend to prefer the program Perplexity which is connected to a search engine which it utilizes to provide references to where it scraped its information. Best Frederik Frederik Stjernfelt: Sheets, Diagrams, and Realism in Peirce – De Gruyter 2022 * “Peirce as a Philosopher of AI”, in Olteanu et al.: Philosophy of AI, forthcoming Fra: <[email protected]> på vegne af Tuezuen Alican <[email protected]> Svar til: Tuezuen Alican <[email protected]> Dato: onsdag den 18. december 2024 kl. 08.43 Til: Mike Bergman <[email protected]>, Gary Richmond <[email protected]>, Peirce-L <[email protected]> Emne: RE: [PEIRCE-L] AI and abduction Dear Mike and Gary, If I’m not mistaken, John Sowa already utilizes LLMs this way. He argues that LLMs are great for abductive conclusions, and later, with an Ontology, he checks whether that “hypothesis” is true or not. At least, that’s my interpretation of his work. @Mike Bergman<mailto:[email protected]>, sorry for the duplication; I pressed reply instead of replying to everyone. Best Regards, Dipl.-Ing. Alican Tüzün, BSc PhD Candidate University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria Josef Ressel Centre for Data-Driven Business Model Innovation Wehrgrabengasse 1-3 4400 Steyr/Austria LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/t%C3%BCz%C3%BCnalican/ Phone: +43 5 0804 33813 Mobil: +43 681 20775431 E-Mail: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Web: www.fh-ooe.at<http://www.fh-ooe.at/imm> Web: https://coe-sp.fh-ooe.at/ [cid:[email protected]] From: [email protected] <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Mike Bergman Sent: Wednesday, 18 December 2024 02:52 To: Gary Richmond <[email protected]>; Peirce-L <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] AI and abduction You don't often get email from [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>. Learn why this is important<https://aka.ms/LearnAboutSenderIdentification> Hi Gary, This is a topic near and dear to me, and one I am very actively investigating (and using) personally (mostly with ChatGPT 4-o1, but also the latest version of Grok). My first observation, granted based on my sample of one, is that abductive reasoning in a Peircean sense is lacking with current LLMs (large language models), as is true for all general ML or AI approaches. Machine learning and deep learning have been mostly an inductive process IMO. A major gap I have seen for quite some time has been the lack of abductive reasoning in most ML and AI activities of recent vintage. This assertion is most evident in the lack of "new" hypothesis generation by these systems, the critical discriminator that you correctly point out from Peirce. One can prompt these new chat AIs with new hypotheses, and in that form, they are very helpful and useful. It is for these reasons that I tend to treat current chat AIs as dedicated research assistants: able to provide very useful background legwork, including some answers that stimulate further questions and thoughts, often in a rapid fire give-and-take manner, but ones that are not creative in and of themselves aside from making some non-evident connections. I believe that better matching of current chat AIs with Peirce's thinking (esp abductive reasoning as he defined) is a particularly rich vein for next generation stuff. Lastly, my own personal view is that the current state of the art is not "dangerous", but we are also seeing very rapid increases of what Ilya Sutskever<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Sutskever> calls "superintelligence", the speed of which is pretty breathtaking. We may be close to tapping out on this current phase with most Internet content already captured for training, but like with LLMs, there are certainly new innovations not yet foreseen that may continue to maintain this Moore's law<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law>-like pace of improvements. Best, Mike On 12/17/2024 6:00 PM, Gary Richmond wrote: List, In a brief article, "How Does A.I. Think? Here’s One Theory" in the New York Times today, Peter Coy, after noting that "Computer scientists are continually surprised by the creativity displayed by new generations of A.I.," comments on one hypothesis that might help explain that 'creativity', namely, that AI is using abduction in its machine reasoning. He writes: One hypothesis for how large language models such as o1 think is that they use what logicians call abduction, or abductive reasoning. Deduction is reasoning from general laws to specific conclusions. Induction is the opposite, reasoning from the specific to the general. Abduction isn’t as well known, but it’s common in daily life, not to mention possibly inside A.I. It’s inferring the most likely explanation for a given observation. Unlike deduction, which is a straightforward procedure, and induction, which can be purely statistical, abduction requires creativity. The planet Neptune was discovered through abductive reasoning, when two astronomers independently hypothesized that its existence was the most likely explanation for perturbations in the orbit of its inner neighbor, Uranus. Abduction is also the thought process jurors often use when they decide if a defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet Peirce argues in the 1903 Lectures on Pragmatism that only abduction "introduces any new idea" into a scientific inquiry: " Abduction is the process of forming an explanatory hypothesis. It is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea; for induction does nothing but determine a value, and deduction merely evolves the necessary consequences of a pure hypothesis." I had always thought of abduction as the unique domain of the individual scientist, the creative genius (say, Newton or Einstein) who, fully versed in the most important relevant findings in his field, retroductively connects those pieces of scientific information to posit a testable hypothesis concerning an unresolved question in science. But it makes sense that an AI program employing large data bases might indeed be able to 'scan' those huge, multitudinous bases, connect the salient information, and posit an hypothesis (or some other abductive idea). Any thoughts on this? For example: Is it potentially a valuable feature and power of AI and, thus, for us (the use of AI in medical research would tend to support this view)? Is it a potential danger to us (some AI programs have been seen to lie, to 'hide' some findings, etc.; might this get out of control)? If AI can create testable hypotheses, is the role of the 'creative' scientist jeopardized? Best,' Gary R _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ARISBE: THE PEIRCE GATEWAY is now at https://cspeirce.com<https://cspeirce.com/> and, just as well, at https://www.cspeirce.com<https://www.cspeirce.com/> . It'll take a while to repair / update all the links! ► PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> . ► To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message NOT to PEIRCE-L but to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> with UNSUBSCRIBE PEIRCE-L in the SUBJECT LINE of the message and nothing in the body. 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_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ARISBE: THE PEIRCE GATEWAY is now at https://cspeirce.com and, just as well, at https://www.cspeirce.com . It'll take a while to repair / update all the links! ► PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] . ► To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message NOT to PEIRCE-L but to [email protected] with UNSUBSCRIBE PEIRCE-L in the SUBJECT LINE of the message and nothing in the body. More at https://list.iupui.edu/sympa/help/user-signoff.html . ► PEIRCE-L is owned by THE PEIRCE GROUP; moderated by Gary Richmond; and co-managed by him and Ben Udell.
