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Article 6053 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: nlc@media.mit.edu (Nick Cassimatis)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Hypothesis: I am a Transducer (Formerly "Virtual Grounding")
Message-ID: <1992Jun3.024527.24593@news.media.mit.edu>
Date: 3 Jun 92 02:45:27 GMT
References: <1992Jun1.142749.8520@cs.ucf.edu> <1992Jun1.201556.24184@news.media.mit.edu> <1992Jun2.165029.14097@neptune.inf.ethz.ch>
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In article <1992Jun2.165029.14097@neptune.inf.ethz.ch> santas@inf.ethz.ch (Philip Santas) writes:
>
>In article <1992Jun1.201556.24184@news.media.mit.edu> nlc@media.mit.edu (Nick Cassimatis) writes:
>>
>>The other thing that bothers me is the probablistic character of QM.
>
>But most of the models of the macroworld are probabilistic.
>Gas laws are based on statistical assumtions. But this does not seem
>to prevent pilots from flying airplanes :-)

While I haven't seen the gas laws formally worked out, from what I've
heard, I get the impression that the "probablilistic assumption" is
not about the laws that govern those particles.  But the point is
moot.  I never meant to imply that probabalism bothers me, only that
bad arguments for probabalism do.  As interesting they may be, the
results of physics never really moved me either way.  Whatever they
turn out to be, it wouldn't change the way I hear a symphony or the
way I think about psychology and a whole bunch of more trivial things.

>Heisenberg's principle does NOT imply randomness. There can be a reason,
>which WE cannot observe with physical means. Where do you see the randomness?

Again, since I haven't read a *real* quantum mechanics bood, I
wouldn't know.  The passage you quote was my reaction to someone who
said the H's principle *is* randomness.

On the relevence of QM to AI: there are many arguments that maintain
that we cannot achieve AI on a computer because a computer can't model
quantum effects.  Even if it can't so what?  There are quantum effects
in water molecules, but we have had some success in modelling fluids.
The neuron is such a big thing that I don's see why quantum effects
would be relevant.  Even if it were relevent on the neuronal level,
who says we have to go all the way down to that level to achieve AI?
I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure we got to the point of building
transistors smaller than a neuron without taking quantum effects into
account.

-Nick


