doug@feedme.UUCP (Doug Salot) (11/21/88)
Gilbert Cockton writes: >Intelligence arises through socialisation. So do other diseases, but that doesn't mean it's the only way to get sick. The Eskimos have lots of words to distinguish between various types of snow; would somebody from sci.lang care to give us a few more words for intelligence? Culturation is one contributing factor to our peculiar brand of intelligence. Our particular set of sensory detectors and motor actuators is another. Neurophysiological constraints and mechanisms is yet another. The chemical makeup of the earth is one. The physics of the universe plays a role. So!? Is our definition of intelligence really so limited as to exclude all other domains? Machines will exhibit the salient properties of human intelligence. A fun book to read is Braitenberg's "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology." Another is Edelman's "Neural Darwinism." Bury Descartes already. Connectionist modeling and neurobiological research will bear fruit; why fight it? We should already be starting on the other hard task: creating robust, self-organizing, self-motive, self-sustaining, self-replicating machines. Artificial Intelligence will look like a cake-walk compared to Artificial Life. Now, leave me alone while I wire-wrap this damn frog. -- Doug Salot || doug@feedme.UUCP || ...{zardoz,dhw68k}!feedme!doug "vox populi, vox canis"
ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe) (11/22/88)
In article <151@feedme.UUCP> doug@feedme.UUCP (Doug Salot) writes: >Machines will exhibit the salient properties of human intelligence. >A fun book to read is Braitenberg's "Vehicles: Experiments in >Synthetic Psychology." Another is Edelman's "Neural Darwinism." >Bury Descartes already. Connectionist modeling and neurobiological >research will bear fruit; why fight it? To continue this rather constructive approach of suggesting good books to read that bear on the subject, may I recommend Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things -- what categories reveal about the mind George Lakoff, 1987 U of Chicago Press, ISBN 0-226-46803-8 I don't think the data he presents are quite as much of a challenge to the traditional view of what a category is as he thinks, provided you think of the traditional view as an attempt to characterise ``valid'' categories rather than actual cognition, just as classical logic is an attempt to characterise valid arguments rather than what people actually do. As an account of what people do, it is of very great interest for both AI camps, and it provides *evidence* for the proposition that non-human intelligences will not "naturally" use the same categories as humans. As for connectionist modelling, it doesn't tell us one teeny tiny little thing about the issues that Lakoff discusses that "classical AI" didn't. Why pretend otherwise? Case-based reasoning, now, ...
alexandr@surya.cad.mcc.com (Mark Alexandre) (11/23/88)
In article <17347@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> sp299-ad@violet.berkeley.edu (Celso Alvarez) writes: >In article <151@feedme.UUCP> doug@feedme.UUCP (Doug Salot) asks: >>would somebody from sci.lang care to give us a few more >>words for intelligence? > >Intelligence is the art of sounding intelligent. > And art is what I say it is.
lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee) (01/15/89)
From article <43582@linus.UUCP>, by bwk@mbunix.mitre.org (Barry W. Kort): " ... But our own category boundaries are still somewhat arbitrary. " And, by studying the "elements" we don't automatically understand how " they assemble themselves into "molecules". Of course not, but is this a fair analogy for reductionism? I don't think so. Reductionist theories may occasionally arise by identifying elements apart from the patterns they assemble into (perhaps molecular biology would be a case?), but more typically the pattern is observed first. Later, a reduction into elements which assemble according to certain rules is proposed to explain the patterns. There is no step of analysis apart from synthesis -- the rules of assembly are intrinsically a part of the theory. Instances are the analysis of atoms to explain the pattern of the periodic table and the analysis of particles to explain the 8-fold way, probably. An instance I know more about may be drawn from Ventris' decipherment of Linear B. The molecules were, let us say, the signs of the writing system, and the atoms the vowels and consonants they stand for. A pattern in the data was that some signs appeared only at the beginning of (what were inferentially) words. One basis of the decipherment was the identification of such signs as standing for single vowels, the reasoning being that if the script was syllabic and if the language being written did not permit vowels to occur next to one another within a word (which is a common restriction), vowel-only syllables and their signs could occur only word-initially. This would explain the pattern. This, and other such inferences comprised Ventris' theory. (Other previous failed attempts to decipher the script were, however, based on direct assignments of phonetic values to signs.) One cannot find here a step of synthesis that is chronologically or logically "after" the analysis. I suspect that the criticism proponents of holistic theories make of reductionism is founded on a play on words -- an equivocation. There is traditionally a use of the term 'analysis' which opposes it to synthesis, but more commonly, 'analysis' does not refer merely to a decomposition somehow apart from composition. Greg, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu