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Article 6286 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: 5-step program to AI
Message-ID: <1992Jun17.181322.7736@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Date: 17 Jun 92 18:13:22 GMT
References: <1992Jun16.213227.31307@mp.cs.niu.edu> <60835@aurs01.UUCP>
Organization: Northern Illinois University
Lines: 36

In article <60835@aurs01.UUCP> throop@aurs01.UUCP (Wayne Throop) writes:
>> rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)

>John Nagle mentions that "Currently, we seem to be in the insect-level
>AI era.". I think the "richness" distance between "bugs" and frogs is
>smaller than that between frogs and dogs,

  You should be very cautious about this.  At least frogs and humans are
both vertebrates.  The frog is not too far from being one of our
evolutionary ancestors.  It is thus highly likely that many aspects of
mental organization of frogs are shared by humans, although probably
some significant new types of neural organization have also cropped up
which frogs do not share.

  We share far less common ancestry with insects.  The neural evolution
of insects is probably largely an independent development, so there is no
great reason to assume that insects and vertebrates both converged on
the same approaches to intelligence.

>>>I think that the apparent facility with "higher reasoning" that
>>>computers currently have IS essentially fiddling with "meaningless
>>>squiggles and squoggles", and any meaning is only read in by humans
>>>(or at least, to a very large degree).
>> This is why I consider computer intelligence to be approximately the
>> increment from the chimpanzee to the human.
>
>Hmmmm.  Interesting.  That would fit in with what I said just above.
>However, it still seems to me that the "symbol manufacture" that
>computers can do isn't quite the same thing as what humans
>(as opposed to other mammals) do.

  In computers we string together sequences of atomic items from a discrete
set, typically either ASCII characters or binary digits (depending on what
level you want to view it).  Human string together sequences of phonemes
from their language, which are also atomic items from a discrete set.  Is
there all that much difference?


