From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!tdatirv!sarima Tue Jan 21 09:26:53 EST 1992
Article 2857 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!tdatirv!sarima
>From: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Cargo Cult Science
Message-ID: <380@tdatirv.UUCP>
Date: 17 Jan 92 18:56:06 GMT
References: <92Jan15.175909est.14446@neat.cs.toronto.edu> <1992Jan16.061242.21335@news.media.mit.edu> <1992Jan16.190930.14079nagle@netcom.COM>
Reply-To: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: Teradata Corp., Irvine
Lines: 34

In article <1992Jan16.190930.14079nagle@netcom.COM> nagle@netcom.COM (John Nagle) writes:
|
|     The idea that a theory should be "refutable" refers to refutability by
|experiment.  To be useful, a theory must make predictions.  If the predicted
|phenomena don't occur, the theory is wrong.  That's what "refutability"
|is all about.

If you replace 'experiment' above with 'organized observation', and if you
define 'prediction' to mean 'specifies the content of future observations',
then I agree with you.

Otherwise you have just excluded most of biology from science!

|      The physicists are presently facing a philosophical problem with 
|superstring theory.  Superstring theory describes events at so small
|a scale and so high an energy level that no one can conceive of any
|way to test them experimentally.  Some physicists question whether
|superstring theory is even physics for that reason.

It *is* refutable in principle though.  It is just beyond out current
technology.

|      Thought for today: If we can build a low-end mammal robot, say
|a mouse-level AI, with the coordination, dexterity, and vision of a
|mouse, we will probably be most of the way to a human level AI, based
|on how long evolution took, how much the anatomy of the human and mouse
|cortices are similar, and how little the DNA of mouse and human differs.

Absolutely, I agree.
I have said exactly this many times.
-- 
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uunet!tdatirv!sarima				(Stanley Friesen)



