Natural Machine Logic

Foreword

Natural Machine Logic (NML) is a system of dynamic thought and algebraic

logic that is the first after Turing's to show a different route and means to
automated activity and “machine intelligence.” We have been close to it before,
but the siren song of being able to trace computation and static logic back to the
ancient philosophers (and the more modern works of Boole and Frege), has
been too much to resist. The lure of precedence and authority descending from
the respected masters, including Aristotle, is overwhelmingly beguiling. The
large body of work on NML has laid bare the essentials of those primitive
logics, computation, and software, and has flown beyond that simple static state
of affairs to a better place which, after all, includes all of what has gone before,
as well as the new dynamic operators and logic elements.

As a young engineer working to improve automation in a manufacturing plant,

I was confronted with some very basic problems in machine control having to
do with events in time. Searching for solutions, it became evident there were no
temporal logic elements, while there were so many varieties of spatial logic
elements (combinations of Boolean operators AND (conjunction) and NOT
(negation) expressed in hardware). These were various arrangements of logic
elements configured as OR, NOR, AND, NAND, EXOR, EXNOR and so forth.
There were also sequential logic elements which combined the Boolean
operators together with STORE, the memory operator, to form counters and
storage registers, state-machines, arithmetic-logic units, memories, and such.
There were no temporal operators embodied in logic elements, so over time,
these useful items were generated. Working with the new temporal logic
elements enabled development of the rationale, symbols, and syntax for
specifying, monitoring, and controlling ongoing physical processes.

Realizations dawned for years (and they are still occurring) about the NML
system created with the combination of spatial logic, temporal logic, and
spatio-temporal logic. Exploration and discovery continues in this new system
of thought and action. It helps to juxtapose it against conventional systems such
as software or even a popular book on string theory. Work with NML has
generated two patents, one magazine article, and several conference papers on
this unconventional theme in past years, but the major portion of work on NML
has not heretofore been published.

Man tends to think the latest and greatest technology (at the moment:
computers) exemplifies the world or humanness, but treating time as if it was
continuous gives much better results in automation than the commonly
accepted (computational) frame-by-frame practice.

The conventional systems of logic can only recognize or perform operations

that transform or translate values in space. Ordinary logic treats time poorly
through the constraint of translating all temporal signs, signals, and effects into
the space-domain so as to be suitable for space-only operations. Contemporary
logic can easily assign state, but it is powerless to assign cause. Life is seasoned
with activity. Humans have more than static existence: we experience and also
cause dynamic processes in both space and time. How does one concisely
express and treat the aspects of movement, change, cause and effect, and life
with only static formal tools?

The static systems of logic—descended from Aristotle through Boole [1],

Frege, Prior, Pnueli, and all modern logicists and natural philosophers—are
lacking in several respects. These many models of logical specification [2] are
unable to describe or create any more than was given (sum of the parts), they
can’t directly express causation (which instead must be divined by humans
from static representations), and they can’t be used to express or treat dynamic
or changing scenarios, thus they can’t deal directly with ongoing time or
processes that evolve with time. Now these observable attributes, including
synergy or emergent behavior, cause and effect, dynamic activities and ongoing
time, are very evident in the real world. The simple process of combustion,
which takes place many times per second in millions of engines worldwide,
could not be directly and completely specified in any of those existing systems
of logic without describing a succession of frozen states, frame-by-frame. This
failing in logic justifies the existence of the hard sciences. Chemistry and
physics for instance, have means with which to satisfactorily describe and
explain combustion.

One of the troubles with philosophy, logic, “computational intelligence," and

other systems of thought is that the formal logic used to specify and
substantiate or support concepts and systems is confined to static frames in the
space-domain. All temporal information, therefore, must be referred to tokens
and labels situated in space. These items of information are made into data,
after which the only recourse is mechanical data-processing via Turing-type
machines (TMs) or manual methods. The ancients played and dealt with
concepts by writing them down and by thinking of them in fixed format. We
can now do the same using computers, but the fundamental logic operators
being used have not expanded or grown with the passing of millennia. We are
thus limited to combinations and sequences of AND, NOT, and STORE. The
whole of computer science is based on not much more than those few
operators. First-order and modal logics are fundamentally static means through
which actions are reckoned from fixed statements or frames, evaluated after-
the-fact. Such static treatment, even aided by super-fast computers, often fails
to produce results appropriate for dynamic processes.

Using static and fixed labels, formal logic discourse admits only of existence,
non-existence, and conjunction (in both space and time). This package of
restrictions in thought excludes dynamics from that frozen arena. But life
exhibits self-motivated activities. How can such functions be specified or even
explored with logic that allows only static states or static labels about dynamic
states? Aside from how a condition or process is and how it relates to other
things in tableaux, there is a desire to know or be able to precisely and
concisely specify how it came to be, what caused it, and how it acts. There isn’t
any such treatment in formal logic, although in ordinary language we routinely
express dynamics in a way that most understand our meaning. Such efforts,
done formally however, may take a book-length work to describe.

How does one properly treat dynamical situations with only static tools such as
TMs and Boolean logic? The accepted answer is, “frame by frame,” an
insufficient and poor stance. As Bergson put it, in Time and Free Will, "Where
is the becoming?" As Dr. Lee Smolin (in The Trouble With Physics) asked,
"How can we represent time without turning it into space?" The new system of
logic, NML, answers all of these questions. It includes verbs as dynamic
operators and allows causative actions and the changes they make to be
recognized, specified, documented, and analyzed; and (in control systems) to
have direct and immediate effects on physical processes.

NML is a non-computational, non-Turing method of reckoning in which the

vocabulary of logic has been greatly expanded. There are many more logic
operators and functions (permutations of logic operators), all with
corresponding logic elements, than are available in the static combinations of
AND, NOT, and STORE of purely conventional means. The new operators and
elements operate natively in the time and space-time domains on the natural
flow of events and condition changes in dynamic processes.

The ancients held that logical formulations, especially premises, were to be

kept unchanged (otherwise how could conclusions retain validity?). It has been
held so even in modern times, although now it is evident that change is the only
constant. There is, however, no "logic of change" currently accepted. The
challenge met in this work was to identify and define the “words” or operators
that are generally common to dynamic processes vs. being limited to the
combinations of the AND, NOT, STORE operators that enable only
computation. NML is one invention that is practical and useful in the world of
automation for documenting, recognizing, and acting on change. It may also be
useful to logicists in general, and to philosophers.

Although Natural Machine Logic may eventually find use in many disciplines
and technologies, this book is aimed primarily at its practical use in machine
and appliance automation. I hope you will find it interesting and informative.

Charles Moeller
cmoel888@aol.com
References:
1. George Boole’s An Investigation of the Laws of Thought.
2. About thirty “non-standard” logics (aside from predicate calculus and propositional logic) are
listed in http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/courses/logsys/nonstbib.htm

Copyright 2005, 2008, 2010

by c.moeller@ieee.org