Logic, Reasoning, Decision-Making

• Main Author: Nataliia Reva
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: International Society of Philosophy and Cosmology 2018-11-01
• Series: Future Human Image
• Subjects: logic; syllogism; deductive reasoning; bounded rationality; decision-making; Artificial Intelligence
• Online Access: http://www.fhijournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/FHI_10_Reva.pdf

The author focuses the main attention on the people’s everyday reasoning and its mechanism developing the idea that the human mind influenced by the bounded rationality does not always use the logical tools to make a decision. More precisely, the author is talking about the deductive reasoning cherished by Aristotle and its place in real-life reasoning. The main questions raised in this paper are: (1) Does Aristotelian syllogism work for real life? (2) Are we the rational creatures with the “computer mind”? (3) What differs us from the Artificial Intelligence in the decision-making process? Comparing the processing work of a computer program, especially the Artificial Intelligence, with the everyday reasoning of the human mind, the author comes to the conclusion that Aristotelian logic has a more significant impact on the development of the AI than on human thinking. One of the main reasons is that the machines, no matter how advanced they are, are free from the external influences. They use the program put in their mainboard without “thinking” of the outcomes. They do not care if the results of their calculations or actions hurt someone. For example, those new autonomous cars with the movement detectors enable the driver to sleep during the trip, because the machine is driving for you, steering wheel angle, checking the road conditions and correcting the path itself. At the same time, it will not think of your body position and will you be hurt or not in case of the abrupt stop when the child appears in front of the car. It does as it was programed (or how it had learn) to do. While human can use different tools to reach their goal and make the decisions in real life. People do not stay rational all the time and, unlike the machines, can use intuition or do some moves without thinking just by force of habit. These unconscious forces can both help and hurt human decisions.