Exploring the Lashon Hakodesh[1] of Linear and Nonlinear Halakhah[2] for Artificial Intelligence Masechet[3] to Guide the Beth Din[4]

by
Dallas F. Bell, Jr.

The Christian astronomer and physics professor, Georges H. J. E. Lemaître (1894-1966) proposed the hypothesis of the pivotal atom as the physical origin of the universe.  That theory, known as the Big Bang, was later supported by Edwin Hubble (1889-1953).  The Christian Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) wrote in his Summa Theologica that all effects, such as our universe, had a cause(er).  That cause must be greater than its effects.  The Christian, Saint Augustine (354-430), asserted in Book XI of his Confessions that time is measured by movements and is an extension of a mental observation of an event (the movement relationship to other movements/positions intersecting noted by a fixed point of time).

Augustine's idea that time began when the universe was created was later supported by Albert Einstein (1879-1955).  This notion disproved arguments by Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) and others that time existed eternally before creation.  The cause of the first cause of all effects, the Creator, must have then existed outside of time and be eternal and omniscient—God.  That only true God would have attributes that are outside of our time of past and future, such as love, justice and even mathematical numbers.  René Descartes (1596-1650) maintained that only a perfect Being (creator God) could be the cause for man possessing the idea of perfection (L. esse objectivum or objective being).

Causation is the transmitting of a property from one thing to another.  Parmenides of Elea (b. c. 515 B.C.) explained in Principle of Sufficient Reason that nothing comes from nothing (L. ex nihilo nihil fit).  Both David Hume (1711-1776) and Descartes agree that nothing occurs without a cause. 

It would be an illusion to think that an effect is greater than its cause.  For example, if a slab of ice falls off a glacier into a surrounding body of water (stored energy) with such force the waves flood adjacent banks all forces or causes of those describes effects must be analyzed to fully understand what has taken place.  Heat caused the effect of ice to break off the glacier.  Gravity caused the ice to fall into the water.  Gravity caused the water to flood down the banks.  It would be incorrect to say that the small amount of ice caused the greater release of flood energy.  Each step of the described event had a greater cause produce a smaller event.

All causes are greater than their subsequent effects and so God is greater than our universe He created.  He intelligently created with purpose and would apply attributes of love and justice toward human behavioral controls or laws.  Those laws would prohibit stealing, lying, murder, and etc. and must be revealed for a Halakhah (Heb. for path or way to go).  There is only one text, the Bible of Judeo-Christian beliefs, that has met this threshold.  It says that "in the beginning" (Heb. Bereisheet[5]) God created all things. 

The Torah[6] (the first five books of the Old Testament written by Moses) also contains the Divine laws for man's behavior toward God and man's behavior toward his fellow man.  Those Aseret ha-Dibrot[7] (the Ten [words or sayings] Commandments) are interpolated by other laws.  The Torah can be read linearly and nonlinearly.  A linear reading could apply the commandment to work six days and to rest of the seventh day (Sabbath[8]) as was modeled by God creating recorded in Bereisheet.

Postliberal theology looks at the scriptures with a narrative theology.  A narrative (L. narrare meaning to recount) view is somewhat synonymous with a story or myth.  It is expected that a narrator would anticipate the reader's decoding of the text and use words to achieve the desired result.  If the scriptures were a mythological narrative it would have no Divine foundation to tell the past or develop an eschatology nor regulate behavior and all men would then be their own authority for all things which is epistemological nihilism.[9]

The narrative theological view is inconsistent with a creator God of absolutes.  He must have a Divine absolute to have lovingly and justly chosen absolute right over absolute wrong and must convey that to His creation.  Without His Divine Spirit help, false reasoning is not likely to be overcome with finite reasoning.

If humans applied a myth to all their narrative communication between themselves, no literal ideas, such as two apples plus two more apples equals four total apples, could be exchanged negating societal efficiency.  This is why metaphors and parables are usually clear to most rational people as contrasted with literal accounts.  It is only logical to believe that the infinite God would also be clear in communications.  If God says He created all things in our universe in six literal days it is either accepted or it is rejected.

To reject God's account, no matter how academically subtle, is still rejection and reasonably subject to karet[10] (Heb. to be cut off).  Rejection of God has a negative material consequence of efficiency with the environment and a negative spiritual consequence of separation from a right relationship with God, which could only be breeched by a holy perfect sacrifice by God himself known by Christians as Jesus.  In other words, man causes his behavioral effect which is less than himself.  Man then needs infinite God to be the causer for man's forgiveness effect for failing to meet the holy standard for behavior.  Holy God, in grace (an unmerited effect toward one being from another being with a higher cause[11]), forgives with Jesus' (theanthropos[12]) Divine sacrifice from His infinite higher cause beyond man's finite ability.[13]  This is why man's works[14] can never be able to satisfy God's eternal holy standard of redemption from sin and karet.  All of mankind, without God's redemption from mercy and love, stands before His perfect just righteousness in damnable unrighteousness.[15]

People that reject God's six account of creation often try to reconcile their old universe beliefs with scriptures.  Gerald Schroeder, a nuclear physicist and Orthodox Jew with smicha[16] (Heb. leaning of the hands) rabbinical training, has indicated that time has stretched from God's point of creating to the human's earthly view and took only six 24-hour days whereas from earth it would have measured billions of years.  Of course, this view is inconsistent with other clear passages in the Torah, such as the literal genealogical account of Adam and Eve and their descendents.  Not since God placed an angel in front of the perfect earthly paradise (Eden), after expelling Adam and Eve (karet) for breaking His laws, has there been a perfect human condition on Earth.

The creation account, laws, genealogies, etc. are not sui generis (L. meaning of its own genus or kind) with a reality disconnected from other realities.  While the quote of Midrash Bamidbar Rabbah (13:15-16) of shiv'im panim le'Torah[17] (Heb. for seventy faces to the Torah) is true that all principles are found in the Torah, not all things are found in the Torah, such as the address of your house, etc.  The Chazal[18] (Heb. acronym for "our sages, may their memory be blessed"[19]) seem to relish ambiguous, figurative, and allegorical discussions.  Jonathan Rosen's (2000) book, The Talmud and the Internet, says the Chazal system makes a virtue of ambivalence and builds uncertainty into the bedrock assertions of faith in the Talmud[20] (Heb. for teachings) to confuse non Jews.

At some point in history, Jewish philosophy began to incorporate rhetorical and semantic hurdles in discussing the Tanakh[21] (Heb. acronym for the Old Testament) to confuse outsiders, which causes Jewish philosophers to appear as if they are chasing their tails.  Jesus opposed the Jewish leaders of His day for obscuring truth in hypocrisy (Matt. 23) while He himself made good use of parables clearly distinguished from literal accounts.

Sa'adiah ben Yosef Gaon (Gaon, means genius, b. c. 882/892-942) wrote in his Emunoth ve-Deoth[22] (Heb. for Beliefs and Opinions) that when the conclusions of pure reason are found to contradict the meaning of the Torah, once the reasoning has been subjected to great scrutiny, the verses in question must be reinterpreted.  That reason pattern, like a computer program, begins with an accepted truth of scripture and has an interpretation analyzed for consistency with other scripture and is either determined to be true and applied, which ends the process or it is determined to be false and a return is made to the scripture to begin the process with another interpretation all over again until the process is completed.

It is clear that the Torah indicates God, Yehovah[23] (also Jehovah, Heb. meaning self-existent, eternal; also YHWH[24] in Ex. 6:3 of the Tanakh) spoke to Adam in Eden and Adam named the animals in Hebrew, e.g. behemoth[25] is the hippopotamus or nilehorse in Job 40:15 (Gen. 2:15-25).  God spoke the world into existence (Gen 1:3; 1:27-30) and must have chosen the most perfect form of language for human communication.  Satan then used this known language to deceive Eve (Gen. 3).  All people spoke one language (Gen. 11:1-9) until Babel where Nimrod (descended from Noah recorded in Gen. 10:8) was named with a non Hebrew meaning (Gen. 10:10).

The commandments were written in Hebrew for Moses in stone and continues to indicate that the Holy Language (Heb. Lashon Hakodesh) is Hebrew.  This Divine language would have unique precision and power.  Jesus spoke in Hebrew (Acts 26:14-18) as did Paul (Acts 21:40; 22:2).  This is the explanation by Orthodox Jews' refusal to use Hebrew except for religious purposes.

Jonathan Rosen argues that the Talmud is an endless sea whose word "tractate" (Heb. masechet means webbing) anticipated, in a way, the digital and hypertextual nature of the Internet.  David Olson, in What Writing Is, explains that writing, unlike speech, is a means of making a thought real so as to provide better propositional thought, much like music compositions.  Writing can be seen as both an analog and a digital process.  Gabriel Levy, Aarhus University professor, wrote that the Talmud and the Internet represent hybrid analog and digital forms.

There is logic in Solomon's Proverbs.  For example, if this "to fear the Lord" then this "is the beginning of wisdom" is a logic pattern (Prov. 1:7).  Ecclesiastes is an application of Solomon's logic.  This demonstrates the need for balance of logical application when reductio ad absurdum.  That decision tree of "this-not this" should lead to the negative as when a debate subject is couched as affirmative or negative.  An example would be that subject X is true (affirmative position) or not (negative position).

The Hebrew language would be the best language to use for societal expression and the Bible would be the best source of human behavioral guidelines.  Societal law, as in the U. S., is enforced in local, state, military and federal courts.  There are also U. S. indigenous (American Indian) courts based on oral traditions and complex combinations of statutes, rules, regulations, tribal laws, treaties, and agency and judicial decision.[26]  Jewish believers also have a court system called Beth Din (Heb. for house of judgment).

Each court system adopts law[27] to shape the society.  Types of law range from criminal law (penal law) to contract law.  Legal systems are made of civil law, with millennia of acceptance, and common law, with recent acceptance of court decisions in stare decisis (L. to stand by a decision).  Jurisprudence is the philosophy of law and looks at problems internal to law and systems and problems of societal law as it relates to the society at large.

A problem that exists in criminal courts is the ability to provide proof beyond a reasonable doubt of guilt to jurors, while protecting the innocent.  Circumstantial evidence, as opposed to direct evidence, is evidence inferred which leads to a proper conclusion of fact.  Finding guilt or innocence, through reasoning, requires the finite mind of jurors to problem solve complex sets of data in an abstract manner which exceeds the capacity of most in the jury pool.  Thus, the innocent are convicted wrongly and the guilty are freed wrongly.

Gustave Le Bon's (1841-1931) 1896 book titled the Crowd: A study of the Popular Mind discusses the new psychological dynamics when a crowd (or jury in this case) is formed.  The crowd can be summed up as demonstrating irrational herd type behavior.  Saul M. Kassin, noted psychologist, et al. has studied the ability of people to recognize a false confession to a crime.  Seventeen inmates were recruited to participate and be videotaped.  Male and female (61 civilians and 57 police) observers were each given ten different inmate confessions to both true and false admissions of one of five crimes.  The civilians were more accurate than the police but the police were more confident in their abilities, because many of them had been trained in detecting visual cues even thought audio cues offer much more accurate signs.

Analysis of recent DNA exonerations of crime suggests that false confessions are implicated in more than 20% of all wrongful convictions.  False confessions are made due to mental problems or when forced through police interrogation techniques.  The police, judges, and jurors have demonstrated trouble discerning true from false confessions.  Looking at sixty proven false confessions (Richard Leo and Richard Ofshe in 1998), it was discovered that 73% of the defendants were tried on false confessions and had been wrongly found guilty.  Saul Kassin believes the problem encountered in courts is not often attributable to irrational human juries but to flaws, inaccuracies, mistakes, and various forms of contaminated evidence presented to jurors.[28]

It has been pointed out that expert stock brokers are less accurate in picking profitable stocks from company behavioral analysis than monkeys choosing profitable stocks by throwing dart at a list of stocks.  In November of 1993, NOAA[29] showed a significant improvement of 1-3 day and 4-7 day weather forecasts.  The change was attributed to improved computer forecasting models.  Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) in Worstward Ho (1983) said "Ever tried.  Ever failed.  No matter.  Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better."  That advice is applicable to developing computer models.  It took years to reach the level where computers could be victorious over human chess masters.

Anne von der Leith Gardner in 1987 said law and legal reasoning are natural targets for artificial intelligence (AI) systems.  Like medical diagnosticians, legal analysts interpret data in higher-level concepts.  In law, the data is aimed at understanding natural language about a human event.  The statements of law, too, are written in natural language and legal arguments are often about what the language means and ought to mean.

Brazilian Judge Pedro Valls Feu Rosa (b. 1966) developed a computer program which allows street officers to issue on the spot fines and recommendations for jail sentences for offenses.  He reasoned that if evidence was clear then that pure logic could be tasked to a computer.  The contingency is that a human judge could always overrule a computer decision.  It should be generally expected that judges and other court participants would resist AI applications, just as past chess masters resented loosing chess matches to a computer.  Conversely, the rigid efficient military culture would generally be most accepting of computerization of military codes of law.

Gerald Schroeder thinks that Divine intelligence is in the Torah but that AI of law could progress independently to whatever limited level it can achieve.[30]  The End of Lawyers, by Richard Susskind (b.1961), discusses legal technology and legal decision trees.[31]  Justice Michael Kirby (b. 1939) of Queensland believes that it may be more than 25 years before AI is advanced to the point of superior ability over human ability in courts.  Kurt Gšdel's (1906-1978) incomplete reality will always limit advanced AI progress.  There could be a real or perceived AI bias against groups within the society as well.

Yingxu Wang, engineering professor at the University of Calgary, believes that denotational mathematics and inference algebra will extend the rule-based reasoning capacities in court decisions support systems.  Wang reasons the new mathematics enables machines (computational intelligence) to mimic human inference power.[32]  Lord James Mackay (Baron Mackay of Clashfern b. 1927), prominent British legal expert, supports charges to the jury following a logical pattern approximate to the case and varying in form with circumstances.  For example, there may be a question whether a death was due to accident.  In the British system, the judge's summing up comes after the evidence and it may be dangerous to try to streamline the evidence.[33]

Inference is the process of reaching logical conclusions from premises known or expected to be true.  An inference made from multiple observations is inductive reasoning.  Deductive reasoning is from an observation.  Incorrect inference is called a fallacy.  This occurs when a conclusion is reached when either of the premises is not true.  The rule of inference modus ponendo ponens (L. the way that affirms by affirming) takes two premises, one of "if p" "then q" and another of p and returns the conclusion of q.  Modus tollendo tollens (L. the way that denies by denying) argues if p the q not q therefore not p.

Abduction is a logical inference from p to q since q is the most efficient explanation for p, such as if the grass in the yard is cut it is assumed that someone mowed the yard.  There are other reasons for the grass being cut and abduction (post hoc ergo propter hoc[34]) could be logical fallacy, but is useful for narrowing the possibilities of a conclusion.

Solomon is widely known for using logic to determine the real mother of a baby.  His analysis has been structured in a decision making matrix as developed by Blaise Pascal (1623-1662).[35]  A narrowing of possibilities could be formed by limiting the participation of court decisions to real options.  For example, see the attachment to this paper which begins with a truth (crime x occurred) and evidence is pursued toward either a conclusion of true and ends in a conviction of the prosecuted or not.  If not, the evidence is applied to the defense council's alternative and that person is either later prosecuted or not, or the jury must apply the evidence to their alternative for later prosecution or not.

Curtis Franks', philosophy professor at the University of Notre Dame, reading of Talmud Bavli Zevachim folio 50, regarding the realm of the sacred, says we may not draw an inference from something which itself has been inferred.  He looks at the circularity charge of sugya[36] (Heb. the basic unit of Talmudic dialectical exchange as seen in Platonic dialogue or a Zen kōan[37]).  Franks believes there is precedence in the history of logic for an empirical study of actual reasoning patterns, which then were to be regimented and studied.  This definitely was Gentzen's[38] conception of the study of inference.  Although by the 20^th Century, most logical research proceeds in the opposite direction: First formalize the rules of "right reasoning" according to some a priori arguments and then hold human reason to that standard.[39]

Thomas Gordon conducts research on argumentation technology in the fields of artificial intelligence and law, legal informatics and computational models of argument and heads a research group on governance portals at the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communications Systems in Berlin.  He believes the goal of argumentation technology is to help people improve their quality of reasoning, make better decisions, and be able to explain or justify these decisions in a clearer, more rational, and comprehensive way.[40]  Giovanni Sartor is a professor of the law department at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.  He recommends the research of the AI and Law Journal for the latest AI and court decision making papers.[41]

In Edwin Muir's (1887-1959) Circle and Square, he wrote "half I'll not take nor give, for he who gives giveth all.  By halves you cannot live:  then let the barrier fall, in one circle have all."  His words point out that just court decisions must be a complete set of data and not pieces.  "The quality of mercy is not strained—It blesseth him that gives and him that takes—It is an attribute of God" are the words of Portia from William Shakespeare (c. 1596-98) in the Merchant of Venice.  That is our mission to understand and model the attributes of the Creator.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer dealt very little with adjudication issues in Ethics or in his letters as experienced by a Beth Din,[42] but he did try to be a biblical example of justice during trying times.

The exponentially increasing biased scientific theories indicate that the Bible is on a timetable in that a point is being reached in human history where an anti-biblical logic system will be sufficiently efficient to nullify the Bible's clear truth for most people.  When the Bible is not appropriately taken literally, there ceases to be a Divine authority for human behavior and destruction, as in the ante-diluvium days of Noah, from man's own hand.  Creating and establishing an AI program based on biblical law is a rational attempt to slow mankind's movement toward eventual Armageddon.[43]

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