November 18, 2018 Sunday
Bedtime Story
Why Probabilistic Reasoning?
The conclusions of inductive reasoning
depend on probabilities of its being true or false with a very wide range from
being highly probable to being highly improbable.
When seen this way in its pure and naked
definition inductive reasoning seems to be a poor substitute for its deductive
counterpart.
Why on earth would anyone wish to replace
rock-solid reasoning with probabilistic cognitive approach?
The trouble is that the real world, and by
it I mean nature and us, exist more in grey shades rather than in black and
white.
It is inherently probabilistic not merely
statistically but fundamentally as evidenced from the experimental quantum
mechanics.
We need not even enter into the world of
physics or quantum mechanics to get a basic understanding of the manner in
which probability pervades all aspects of our lives and even perceptions,
behavior and thereby choice and decision making.
In fact our brain and its sensory systems,
most acutely the visual one, is evolutionary probabilistic and Bayesian
cognitive.
Where does this word ‘Bayesian” come from?
The origin of this word lies in the name of
an English statistician Thomas Bayes who was born in 1701 in London and who
also happened to be a Presbyterian minister.
Those were interesting times in England and
Europe when science and religion went hand-in-hand.
Bayes for instance enrolled at the
University of Edinburgh to study two mutually contradictory subjects, logic and
theology.
Furthermore, he went on to publish two
treatises, one in theology and the other in mathematics.
The one is theology is titled “Divine Benevolence,
or an Attempt to Prove that the Principal end of the Divine Providence and the
Government is the Happiness of the Creatures” published in 1731 and what it
would have contained I do not care to know.
The other published work was on mathematics
and more specifically in defense of the calculus that was recently invented by
Newton.
It was titled “An Introduction to the Doctrine
of Fluxions, and a Defense of the Mathematicians against the Objections of the
Author of the Analyst” and published in 1736.
It was just these two works that he had
published and nothing more.
And yet for some very strange reason later in
his life Bayes began to develop an interest in probability.
Different reasons have been proposed by
various historians of mathematics for this later interest of his one of them being
an argument against David Hume.
David Hume, the empiricist English professor,
had published just then (in 1748) a book titled “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding”.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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