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Article 2544 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: weemba@libra.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Edelman's non-computability non-argument
Message-ID: <61662@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: 8 Jan 92 14:45:20 GMT
References: <2215@ucl-cs.uucp> <356@tdatirv.UUCP>
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Reply-To: weemba@libra.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener)
Organization: The Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology
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In-reply-to: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)

In article <356@tdatirv.UUCP>, sarima@tdatirv (Stanley Friesen) writes:
>|Yup. You missed the point, and the hook, line and sinker. The keyword
>|is "truly model". How does a "true model" differ from a "model"? All
>|model are approximations to reality.

>Well, in that case the question 'how does one truly model the outside world'
>becomes totally uninteresting, since there is no such thing as a "true model".

>Certainly even, or especially, humans make do with incomplete and aproximate
>models.  So why is 'true modelling' relevant to the subject at hand?

It isn't.  I threw it in as an ultimate escape clause.  Meanwhile, the
claim that a two-stack push down automaton is good enough for humans and
the real world is unsupported.

Along these lines, I note with irony that the famed Minsky-Papert proof
that perceptrons can't recognize connectivity and the like to be support
for them.  Have you ever seen those illusion pictures involving spiral
mazes?  Where you can't tell if it's one or two walls, except with your
finger?  M&P showed that perceptrons model this perceptual illusion, yet
no one noticed at the time.
-- 
-Matthew P Wiener (weemba@libra.wistar.upenn.edu)


