markh@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Mark William Hopkins) (04/19/91)
In article <1991Apr18.165045.13932@hollie.rdg.dec.com> law@sievax.enet.dec.com (Mathew Law) writes: >Why are these perceptual devices required? By this argument, >would you say that a human brain which suddenly had all its >stimuli removed would no longer be intelligent? If so, would >intelligence return when stimuli returned? Actually it does. When you deprive a human being of sensory input that person will gradually lose their sense of reality and enter some kind of state of neurosis. You restore the sensory stimulation, things will return back to normal (I think). As you probably know, there's been loads of experiments done on this very subject. Our brains are not intelligent finite state machines, but rather intelligent controllers for the human body. They lose feedback, and they'll lose the ability to make continual adjustments keeping it aligned with the external world. The need to sleep figures in all this too somehow... Hofstadter said in no uncertain terms that it's time to wake up from the Boolean Dream and abandon the paradigm whereby the mind is fitted into a symbol-processing automaton (as a primary model, as opposed to a mere approximation of a non-symbolic substratum). The PDP paradigm offers the best known way to go on this issue beyond and beneath the realm of symbolic processing where classical AI breaks down.