Why Logic Alone Can't Explain the Human Mind (with Tom Griffiths)
About this episode
The episode explores the limitations of logic in understanding the human mind through a conversation with Tom Griffiths.
My book, Productiveness, is now available. It's about the difference between doing more and doing what matters, and how we lost the ability to tell them apart. I'll send the release date the day it's set. Visit https://mikevardy.com/productiveness to learn more and get your copy today. Logic is beautiful and it's also almost never enough. That's the tension running through this entire conversation — the idea that we want our decisions to be purely logical because it's simple and concrete, but almost no real situation in a human life actually has the structure logic requires. I've believed for a long time that reason lives somewhere in the nuanced middle between logic and emotion, and I wanted to sit down with someone who's spent a career studying exactly that boundary. Tom Griffiths is a Princeton professor and the author of the new book The Laws of Thought: The Quest for a Mathematical Theory of the Mind . If you know his earlier book, Algorithms to Live By , this one is the foundation underneath it — the deeper, denser history of how mathematics has tried, and often failed, to fully capture how minds work. We covered logic's limits, David Hume's riddle about induction, why AI…
Topics covered
- logic
- human mind
- decision making
- AI systems
- mathematics
- emotion
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