From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.ecf!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!ames!olivea!uunet!tdatirv!sarima Wed Feb 26 12:53:20 EST 1992
Article 3901 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.ecf!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!ames!olivea!uunet!tdatirv!sarima
>From: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Strong AI and panpsychism
Message-ID: <436@tdatirv.UUCP>
Date: 20 Feb 92 17:03:12 GMT
References: <1992Feb19.135322.12283@oracorp.com>
Reply-To: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: Teradata Corp., Irvine
Lines: 38

In article <1992Feb19.135322.12283@oracorp.com> daryl@oracorp.com writes:
|Stanley Friesen writes: (In response to Michael Gemar)
|> Also, at present, it seems likely that the human mind does not
|> always precompute its responses, it generates them on the spot.  Again
|> this is something that a table look-up system does not do, ever.
|
|Why is this difference important? What is unintelligent about
|precomputing responses? It seems to me that it is an efficiency
|question.

I see it as a matter of dealing with contingency.  Precomputed responses
are only good for dealing with *anticipated* situations, on-the-fly responses
are capable of dealing with *unanticipated* situations , and I see this as
one of the core capabilities of an intelligent entity.

And even here this can be looked on as a sort of efficiency, by delaying
decisions until needed you reduce the amount of system capacity needed
to store information (thus, likely, making the system both instantiable
and general - otherwise physical limitations will force it to be specialized).

In short the table lookup scheme is not intelligent because it is incapable
of dealing with unanticipated input (except by 'I don't understand' type
responses). Just because all inputs it will ever actually recieve have
been anticipated, this does not change its lack of flexibility.

|> So, as a first approximation I would say that an intelligent system
|> has to be a complex system that computes at least some of its
|> responses on the fly.
|
|I disagree. It may be true that *humans* are complex systems that
|compute their responses on the fly, but why are these properties
|essential for intelligence?

Mostly because I see dealing with contingency as an inherently complex
problem.
-- 
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uunet!tdatirv!sarima				(Stanley Friesen)


