Post by Martin Ciupa

The designation Homo sapiens asserts a "wisdom" that our current historical trajectory sharply contradicts. If we strip away this aspirational title, we are left not with a moral quality, but with a functional mechanism. While the basic capacity to reason does not uniquely distinguish us from earlier hominids, the dominance of symbolic processing (language, mathematics, map-making) in our engagement with the world arguably does. We have become a species less concerned with the territory than with the relentless computation of a variety of “useful“ maps. In this light, Moshe Vardi proposes a taxonomic shift that favors description over flattery: we are not the wise species, but the reckoning one, I’d say the “map-making” one, thus perhaps “Homo cartographus” Vardi writes… “Homo sapiens, ‘wise human’ in Latin, is the taxonomic species name for modern humans. But observing the current state of the world and its current trajectory, it is hard for me to accept the description “wise human”. I’d like to offer an alternative: Homo rationcinator, or reckoning human – where reckoning refers to both reasoning and computing.” Sse… https://lnkd.in/eU6TJUXZ Moshe Y. Vardi is University Professor and the George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at Rice University. His research focuses on the interface of mathematical logic and computation — including database theory, hardware/software design and verification, multi-agent systems, and constraint satisfaction. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the ACM SIGACT Goedel Prize, the ACM Kanellakis Award, the ACM SIGMOD Codd Award, the Knuth Prize, the IEEE Computer Society Goode Award, and the EATCS Distinguished Achievements Award. He is the author and co-author of over 750 papers, as well as two books. He is a Guggenheim Fellow as well as fellow of several societies, and a member of several academies, including the US National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Science, and the Royal Society of London. He holds nine honorary titles. He is a Senior Editor of the Communications of the ACM, the premier publication in computing. This talk is being held in conjunction with World Logic Day. The proclamation of World Logic Day by UNESCO, in association with the International Council for Philosophy and Human Sciences (CIPSH), intends to bring the intellectual history, conceptual significance and practical implications of logic to the attention of interdisciplinary science communities and the broader public. H/T Moshe Vardi