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From: rhh@research.att.com (Ron Hardin <9289-11216> 0112110)
Subject: Re: Does AI make philosophy obsolete?
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Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ
References: <kunderwo-250995081335@bettymac2.oit.duke.edu> <44efmb$jdm@scotsman.ed.ac.uk> <DFnG0u.1Gu@research.att.com> <44h0ga$dqh@scotsman.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Sat, 30 Sep 1995 01:05:57 GMT
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Chris Malcolm writes:
>Thus the final homunculus is not needed. Hume's intuition that the
>homunculus could not be replaced by any kind of machinery was
>perfectly correct, provided we restrict machinery to the non-recursive
>mechanical kind. Before the invention of the computer, it was beyond
>human imagination to appreciate the subtlety and power of of the ideas
>of recursion and nested virtual machinery. Today this is the stuff of
>undergraduate CS and AI courses, but the concepts are still difficult,
>and many students take many months of intellectual struggle before the
>penny drops. Then it takes years of practical experience of using the
>idea before its latent possibilities are appreciated. For that reason
>it is still a mystery to the uninitiated, and there is still some
>residual philosophical debate here due to ignorance.

What you need now, it seems to me, is something to look at the
parsing you get, and see.

Which leaves it all more or less exactly where it started, doesn't it?
