Category Archives: logic

Searle’s Chinese Room and true understanding

posted by on Sunday January 3, 2021 with No comments! and filed under logic, philosophy

Discussions of artificial intelligence often probe the mystical property of awareness and consciousness. The Turing test is an operational criterion for artificial intelligence: in the Turing test, a person converses with either another person or a computer, but they do not know which. If in a series of tests, the computer is indistinguishable from human, […]


Axiomatizability of classes of structures

posted by on Monday May 27, 2019 with No comments! and filed under logic, ring-theory

Let’s talk about axiomatizability in first-order logic, with examples in ring theory. Let’s call a class $\Ccl$ of rings axiomatizable if there exists a set $T$ of first order sentences such that $C\in\Ccl$ if and only if $C$ is a model of $T$ (that is, satisfies every sentence in $T$.) What are some examples? The […]