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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
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Date: Sun, 1 Oct 1995 19:27:24 GMT
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John McCarthy writes:
>Let us assume, which may not be the case with the CMU vehicle, that
>general facts about the task and the system's goals are represented by
>logical sentences, and the system infers logically that certain
>actions are appropriate to achieve its goals.
>
>A philosopher reading about this program may yawn and say that the
>details about where the image ends and decisions begin are irrelevant
>to the grand questions he contemplates.  He may also say that the
>program that handles the goal structure don't interest him either
>because the behavior they engender isn't at human level.
>
>He is thus making himself obsolete.
>
>Other philosophers take an interest in the goal structure and apply
>ideas descended from Hume and others to do something useful.

Let's do a literary experiment; suppose there are these logical
sentences, and a goal seeking program, and it proceeds by going
from one sentence to the next looking for a way through.

Now suppose instead the sentences are cranked into a BDD and
it does an existential quantification and the answer plops out,
with nothing much else happening.  No task, no goals.

Does one seem more intelligent to you than the other?
They are equivalent, except the BDD is more direct.

The BDD form is the literary equivalent of the hole burned in
the leaf, and it accommodates any complexity you want.
