Next year in Jerusalem: The brilliant ideas and radiant legacy of Miriam Lipschutz Yevick [in relation to current AI debates]

post by Bill Benzon (bill-benzon) · 2023-10-10T09:06:32.271Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

This is a link post for https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2023/10/next-year-in-jerusalem-the-brilliant-ideas-and-radiant-legacy-of-miriam-lipschutz-yevick-in-relation-to-current-ai-debates.html

This is a link post for an article I just published in 3 Quarks Daily. No one has conceptualized the phenomenon of human thought in technical terms more deeply than Yevick did in her 1975 article, Holographic or Fourier Logic. Her conception was certainly incomplete – she knew that. It may also be wrong, but that's something that has yet to be determined. That requires analysis and discussion.

I've quoted Yevick at some length in an earlier post at LessWrong: Miriam Yevick on why both symbols and networks are necessary for artificial minds [LW · GW].

Here is the introduction to the article: 

 

Oh, Ariela, daughter of the People of the Book, the work of the mind is our game!
– Miriam Yevick

I first became aware of Miriam Lipschutz Yevick through my interest in human perception and thought. I believed that her 1975 paper, Holographic or Fourier Logic, was quite important. David Hays and I gave it a prominent place in our 1988 paper, Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence, and in a related paper on metaphor. 

Since Yevick’s work shares a mathematics with some work in machine vision and image recognition, I wondered whether or not that paper had been cited. Moreover, that work is relevant to current debates about the need for symbolic processing in artificial intelligence (AI). As recently as 2007 Yevick was arguing, albeit informally, that human thought requires both poetic, Gestalt, or holographic processing, on the one hand, and analytic, propositional, or logical on the other. 

As far as I can tell, her work has been forgotten. 

That is one thing. But there is more. I become curious about her, this woman, Miriam Lipschutz Yevick. 

What about her? And so I began reading her 2012 memoire, A Testament for Ariela, which takes the form of letters she had written to her grand-daughter in a three-year period in the mid-1980s. The memoire says nothing about her mathematical ideas, though it does mention that in 1947 she became the fifth woman to get a mathematics Ph.D. from MIT. She also talks of her friendship and correspondence with David Bohm, who became a noted quantum theorist. It quickly became clear that she had not had an academic career worthy of her intellectual gifts. Yet she did not seem bitter about that. She had a rich and fulfilling life.

This essay is about both her life and her holographic logic. The work on holographic logic leads me to a harsh assessment of the current debate about artificial intelligence. Thinking about her life leads me to conclude with an optimistic look at the future: next year in Jerusalem.

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