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Article 6073 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: santas@inf.ethz.ch (Philip Santas)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Hypothesis: I am a Transducer (Formerly "Virtual Grounding")
Message-ID: <1992Jun4.005109.29871@neptune.inf.ethz.ch>
Date: 4 Jun 92 00:51:09 GMT
References: <1992Jun1.201556.24184@news.media.mit.edu> <1992Jun2.165029.14097@neptune.inf.ethz.ch> <1992Jun3.024527.24593@news.media.mit.edu>
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In article <1992Jun3.024527.24593@news.media.mit.edu> nlc@media.mit.edu (Nick Cassimatis) writes:
> santas@inf.ethz.ch (Philip Santas) writes:
>>
>>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

All these particles together are modelled by means of statistics.
Boyle's law is based on statistical assumptions for ideal gas.
The reason for using statistical models in such cases is the plethora of
molecular interactions and the uniformity of the molecules.

>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.

There is a relationship between arts and physics or mathematics.
Impressionists were influnced by the QM and Cubists by Relativity.
Xenakis is influenced from Markovian Proceses.
Ancient Greek statues and temples obey to certain eucledian abstract rules.
The list can be very long.

What I want to say, is that you personally may not be influenced by science 
while listening to a symphony, but some composers certainly did
during the production stage.

>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? 

This is indeed an unfortunate argument.

>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 have to add to your questioning, that even if it was relevent then 
the intelligence AMONG HUMANS should be qualitatively distinct!
But again statistical interactions put things back in order.
But these models work for computers too.

>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.

Here you are wrong. Certain light diodes are based exactly on this phenomenon.
But as you said, it is irrelevant to the point of AI.

Philip Santas

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