From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!torn!utcsri!rpi!usc!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!tdat!swf Tue Jun 23 13:21:26 EDT 1992
Article 6334 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: swf@teradata.com (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: The Turing Test is not a Trick
Message-ID: <511@tdat.teradata.COM>
Date: 19 Jun 92 23:56:41 GMT
References: <491@tdat.teradata.COM> <1992Jun18.164543.42825@spss.com> <502@tdat.teradata.COM> <1992Jun19.153904.9560@mp.cs.niu.edu>
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In article <1992Jun19.153904.9560@mp.cs.niu.edu> rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
|
|>Hmm, maybe, maybe not.  I am not sure that such behavior is not possible
|>to a much less 'intelligent' being than a human.  In fact it might even be
|>possible to train a chimpanzee to do simple mechanical repairs.
|
|  An interesting contrast.  First you criticize anthropocentrism.  Then
|you characterize a chimpanzee as "much less 'intelligent'". I agree this
|is not necessarily a contradiction.  However in many ways chimps seem to
|be highly intelligent.  We view them as much less intelligent only because
|we place so much weight on linguistic aspects of intelligence.  That is,
|our characterization of chimps is already highly anthropocentric.

I do not deny that chimps are intelligent, but we *were* talking (or so
I thought) about a replacement for the Turing Test, which is a test for
"human-level" intelligence.

I do not think it exactly anthropocentric to demand the ability to communicate
at the human level for a being to be considered human-level.  In fact,
for the test we are devising, we had already 'agreed' to that since that
sort of communication is implicit in the original TT.

I do *not* demand that language necessarily be auditory, but it *must*
be at least as general as human language for a being to be considered on
our level.  I think of it as sort of the *definition* of intelligence
that one can communicate abstract models.

|  Given that we evolved through non-linguistic species, I believe we
|will understand our intelligence far better if we concentrate on
|understanding the non-linguistic parts of it.  That forms the foundation
|on top of which language was constructed.

This may well be the best method for *achieving* intelligence.
But the question I was dealing with was how to recognize it when we got it.

The goal is very different from the means to get there.

|>Would humor be a universal amoung intelligent beings?  Or is it a particular
|>higher primate adaption to dealing with conceptual dissonance?
|
|  Many mammals are capable of being quite playful at times.  Humor of some
|sort might be a mammalian characteristic, and not just restricted to
|primates.  On the other hand birds do not seem nearly as playful, so
|perhaps humor need not be a universal requirement for intelligence.

But, do birds show a similar sort of intelligence?  They seem to be
(in general) more 'instinct' and less 'learning' oriented than most
mammals.  Thus, they *may* not be capable of open-ended abstraction,
or of originality, while many mammals *are*, to some degree.
(This is an open question to me, it is very difficult to answer objectively).

So, how plausible is an 'avian' style of intelligence?
Would we really recognize such a thing as equivalent to our own?

|>How about 'friendship' and 'bonding' processes?  How would these apply
|
|  These may be essential for intelligence to have evolved as it did
|in humans, and for intelligence to develop in a human child.  It is not
|so clear that they are general requirements for intelligence, though,
|rather than artifacts of the way human intelligence evolved.

That was exactly my question.  Does anyone have any ideas on how to
answer it?
-- 
sarima@teradata.com			(formerly tdatirv!sarima)
  or
Stanley.Friesen@ElSegundoCA.ncr.com


