The Frame Problem (2004)

rzk 21 points 9 comments June 01, 2026
plato.stanford.edu · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (5 comments)

MarkusQ

tl;dr: Since the AI people have lost interest in the frame problem (because they think they can ignore it like the new wave folks, work around it like Fodor, or like Shanahan, think of it as solved) the philosophers would like it back please.

discarded1023

This was a big concern when I was an undergrad in the 1990s. I've since wondered if bunched implications / separation logic / separation algebras / ... [1] that emerged in the early 2000s has resolved this well enough. Opinions? At least some of the problem was due to people unnecessarily restricting themselves to first-order logic for knowledge representation, as advocated by John McCarthy [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_logic [2] see e.g. https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/concepts.pdf

andai

>how do we account for our apparent ability to make decisions on the basis only of what is relevant to an ongoing situation without having explicitly to consider all that is not relevant? I don't think we really have such an ability. Hence microplastics.

deterministic

If I understand it correctly, more advanced logics (based around state transitions) doesn't have this problem (TLA+ etc.)

neerajsi

Another way around this is that things that aren't coherent enough to be described by a finite set of inertial propositions simply aren't perceivable.

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