Ask Alan Kay: If thinking isn't logic – then what is thinking?

This is a good point, I didn't know Alan Kay had said this.

Logic can sometimes be used to describe (to model) some minute aspect of thinking. But it is nearly always a massive simplification, discarding much of what happened during the thought process.

A couple of similar examples that might help:

- Thinking is not arithmetic (but arithmetic can be used to describe the result of some thoughts about stuff.)

- The solar system is not computing anything (but we can use the patterns as a though it were a program executing a timer/counter).

A related point is that thinking is not "executing an algorithm on a Turing machine".

I'm not Alan Kay.

I think the class of answer that the question seems to expect would be subject to criticism as examples of the naturalistic fallacy[1]. The problem boils down to if thinking is logic then we throw the baby out with the bathwater. Either thinking does ceases to include complexities like empathy and thinking about chocolate or logic expands to entail them.

Whether or not one buys the concept one can see evidence of the philosophical issue in classical Greek philosophy as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all struggle with the logical implications when eudiamonia is defined as X.[2]

There's a sense in which 20th century analytic philosophy falls out of Moore's position. Wittgenstein might say that the Greeks philosphers ran into problems because they started using words in an odd way in pursuit of philosophy -- for example by expanding 'logic' to include thinking about chocolate cake.

Another way to look at it is to consider thinking and logic and virtue and satisfaction as atomic and elemental. The philosophical term is Duns Scotus's 'haecceity'.[3] Or as V.S. Naipaul opens A Bend in the River, 'The world is what it is.'

But again, I'm not Alan Kay.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haecceity

Jeff Hawkins' "On Intelligence" is a good attempt to answer this. In shorthe it proposes that thinking "is" prediction, and that prediction is the primary function of the neocortex. It's a good dense (not too fluffy popsci) book.

Eric Baum's "What is Thought?" Asks the same question, and I recall really enjoying it, but I don't think makes asense strong of an answer.

From a logical perspective, first prove logic is thinking.

To me, they seem conceptually different domains.

From a logical perspective, first prove logic is thinking.

It's worth noting that the meanings of a number of very important words have changed over the last 500 years -- sometimes enlarged, sometimes really changing, including: true/false, fact, theory, explanation, believe, logic, etc.

And "thinking". Consider the difference between using logic in traditional mathematics to how thinking needs to be done in the sciences. In the former, we are deriving something, in the latter we are -negotiating- between phenomena and our representations. In science, we don't get to nail our premises/definitions, and we don't get to enumerate the extent cases. We only get inductions. And so on. A "perfectly reasoned conclusion" still needs to be checked out with nature.

In life in the large we have to be even more careful about logic, because it plays into several dozens of biases we have -- ultimately from genetics, but many have been honed by our cultures. In order to do modern thinking in almost every arena, we have to add a lot of context to normal logic, and often have to paradoxically weaken it in order to think better.

In talks, I try to get audiences to understand that logic is not nearly as good a way to think about thinking and do thinking as (say) science is. And science is not the only powerful context we can use to help us calibrate our mental compasses.

With regard to "thinking", logic is one of the servants of the Art, not the Master.