[mod.ai] Understanding Horses

Wayne%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU (Wayne McGuire) (10/10/86)

     Date: Mon 29 Sep 86 09:55:11-PDT
     From: Pat Hayes <PHayes@SRI-KL.ARPA>
     Subject: Searle's logic

     Look, I also don't think there's any real difference between a human's
     knowledge of a horse and [a] machine's manipulation of the symbol it is
     using to represent it.

At one end of the human knowledge spectrum we have that knowledge of a
horse which is aware that two horses + two horses = four horses; at the
other end is that sort of rich and unfathomably complex knowledge which is
expressed in a play like Peter Shaffer's _Equus_, and which fuses, under
the force of sympathetic imagination, conceptual, emotional, biological,
and sensorimotor modes of cognition.  I suppose that our most advanced
expert systems at the elementary end of the cognitive spectrum can capture
knowledge about the structural and functional features of a horse, but it
is not clear that any knowledge representation scheme will EVER simulate
what is most interesting about human cognition and which relies on
unconscious and intuitive resources.  In one dimension of cognition the
world is a machine, an engineering diagram, which is readily accessible by
bit twiddling models; in another, that of, say, Shakespeare, it is a living
organism, whose parts are infinitely interconnected and partially decrypted
only by the power of the imagination.  And so I would argue, with regard to
human and machine cognition of horses or anything else, that there is a
major difference in any dimension of knowledge that counts, and that
repairing automobiles or space stations, and writing or understanding poems
(or understanding the world in the broadest sense), have nearly nothing in
common. 

Wayne McGuire
(wayne@oz.ai.mit.edu)