BIESEL@RUTGERS.ARPA@sri-unix.UUCP (09/30/83)
Some of the more recent messages have questioned the possibility of
producing programs which can "understand" and "create" human discourse,
because this kind of "understanding" seems to be based upon an infinite
kind of recursion. Stated very simply, the question is "how can the human
mind understand itself, given that it is finite in capacity?", which
implies that humans cannot create a machine equivalent of a human mind,
since (one assumes) that underatnding is required before construction
becomes possible.
There are two rather simple objections to this notion:
1) Humans create minds every day, without understanding
anything about it. Just some automatic biochemical
machinery, some time, and exposure to other minds
does the trick for human infants.
2) John von Neumann, and more recently E.F. Codd
demostrated in a very general way the existence
of universal constructors in cellular automata.
These are configurations in cellular space which
able to construct any configuration, including
copies of themselves, in finite time (for finite
configurations)
No infinite recursion is involved in either case, nor is "full"
understanding required.
I suspect that at some point in the game we will have learned enough about
what works (in a primarily empirical sense) to produce machine intelligence.
In the process we will no doubt learn a lot about mind in general, and our
own minds in particular, but we will still not have a complete understanding
of either.
Peolpe will continue to produce AI programs; they will gradually get better
at various tasks; others will combine various approaches and/or programs to
create systems that play chess and can talk about the geography of South
America; occasionally someone will come up with an insight and a better way
to solve a sub-problem ("subjunctive reference shift in frame-demon
instantiation shown to be optimal for linearization of semantic analysis
of noun phrases" IJCAI 1993); lay persons will come to take machine intelligence
for granted; AI people will keep searching for a better definition of
intelligence; nobody will really believe that machines have that indefinable
something (call it soul, or whatever) that is essential for a "real" mind.
Pete Biesel@Rutgers.arpa