From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!wupost!uunet!sun-barr!ccut!wnoc-tyo-news!dclsic!stork!tutkie!tutgw!nitgw!orion!todd Wed Feb  5 11:55:42 EST 1992
Article 3346 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!wupost!uunet!sun-barr!ccut!wnoc-tyo-news!dclsic!stork!tutkie!tutgw!nitgw!orion!todd
>From: todd@ai07.elcom.nitech.ac.jp (Todd Law)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Searle Agrees with Strong AI?
Message-ID: <TODD.92Jan29143005@ai07.elcom.nitech.ac.jp>
Date: 29 Jan 92 05:30:07 GMT
References: <TODD.92Jan22225612@ai12.elcom.nitech.ac.jp>
	<1992Jan23.032151.8824@nuscc.nus.sg>
	<TODD.92Jan23224728@ai12.elcom.nitech.ac.jp>
	<1992Jan27.023737.1343@nuscc.nus.sg>
Sender: news@nitgw.elcom.nitech.ac.jp
Reply-To: todd@juno.elcom.nitech.ac.jp
Organization: Nagoya Institute of Technology, Nagoya ,Japan.
Lines: 57
In-reply-to: smoliar@maclane.iss.nus.sg's message of 27 Jan 92 02:37:37 GMT


In article <1992Jan27.023737.1343@nuscc.nus.sg> smoliar@maclane.iss.nus.sg (stephen smoliar) writes:

>>This has been a busy morning.  I cannot remember the classical name for the
>>fallacy of interpreting "some" to mean "all."  Spafford is not being quite
>>as silly as you would read him to be.

Guess I am somewhat to blame here.  I understood the quote you gave to
mean that life can only exist in an environment of which some part is
also alive.  So if we take the universe and classify everything in it
as being either alive or not alive, you seemed to be saying that the
alive part (life) required the non-alive part (its environment) to be 
partly alive.  Clearly a contradiction.  Perhaps that is what I was
aiming at, however ill-stated.

Or perhaps the quote was meant to mean life can only be defined as a
ecosystem (as you suggest later) with interacting live parts and not-alive
parts.

>>This DOES raise an interesting point about defining life.  Many of us seem
>>inclined to wrestle over how life should be defined and then define an
>>ecosystem as a system whose components are alive.  Perhaps we are going
>>at this the wrong way around.  Perhaps we should first try to define what
>>constitutes an ecosystem:  What is it about both the whole, its parts, and
>>the way those parts interact that leads us to classify it as such.  After
>>than, we should be in a position to classify the living parts of the ecosystem.
>>This then gives us the definition of life over which we have been struggling:
>>A living entity is a living part of an ecosystem!

This opens a large can of worms which is perhaps unnecesary.  It is
more a description of how life happens to occur in our environment.  There
could very well be a planet with exactly one intelligent, alive being
(albeit lonely!) on a totally barren landscape (suppose it eats black dirt,
produces brown dirt excrement, and produces one offspring after which
it quickly dies).  Would you still call such a system an ecosystem?

>>This leads me to ask if we might take an analogous approach to intelligence.
>>There seems to be a general consensus by now that coming up with definitions
>>for intelligence from scratch do not get very far.  Perhaps we would be in a
>>better position to try to characterize a SOCIAL system (analogous to an
>>ecosystem) and approach intelligence in terms of how well individuals manage
>>in that social system.  Needless to say, such an approach should be as free
>>as possible of our own cultural biases;  so perhaps it is time for the
>>anthropologists to move in again (as they did in Suchman's work on planning).

Again, unnecessary.  The same line of reasoning that says "birds cause
flying", and airplanes don't fly.  Gotta keep the airplanes out of the
flight club and the Chinese room out of the intelligence club!!

Maybe we should define life as something which discriminates.
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nagoya Institute of Technology, Itoh Laboratory
todd@juno.elcom.nitech.ac.jp
$@%H%C%I!&%i!w0KF#8&5f<<(J.$@L>(J$@8E209)6HBg3X(J
todd@juno.elcom.nitech.ac.jp (052-732-2111 ext. 2624)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------


