Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!solaris.cc.vt.edu!uunet!psinntp!relay1!rsvl_ns!ernie!pja1.rsvl.unisys.com!pja1
From: pja1@rsvl.unisys.com
Subject: Re: Mixed motives
Sender: news@rsvl.unisys.com (News Admin)
Message-ID: <pja1.18.0131CE25@rsvl.unisys.com>
Date: Wed, 19 Oct 1994 19:48:33 GMT
Lines: 78
References:  <781864672snz@chatham.demon.co.uk>
Nntp-Posting-Host: pja1
Organization: Unisys - Roseville, MN
X-Newsreader: Trumpet for Windows [Version 1.0 Rev B]

In article <781864672snz@chatham.demon.co.uk> ohgs@chatham.demon.co.uk (Oliver Sparrow) writes:
>From: ohgs@chatham.demon.co.uk (Oliver Sparrow)
>Subject: Mixed motives
>Date: Tue, 11 Oct 1994 08:37:52 +0000

>This usegroup has, in common with many others, somewhat mixed motives. The
>following is a very partial deconstruction, which others may care to expand.
>I suspect that we should communicate much better if we had a sense of the 
>different issues which people are trying to address, often in parallel.

>The following themes seem to emerge:

>1: How does one understand the subjective state of awareness?
>2: If the brain is to be understood as a mechanism, then how are the apparently 
>   complex phenomena which we observe to be reconciled with what we know about
>   machines?
>3: How does what we know to occur in neurophysiological systems informs what
>   we might like to do in machines? Conversely, how might having a cognitive
>   engine into the working sof which we have direct inspection and insight 
>   offer us a fix on how biological systems operate?
>4: Are there features of existence which are ineluctably tied to 
>   biological systems in general and human beings in particular; can these be 
>   derived logically and what are the implications of this being so?
>5: How is knowledge to be represented in a system: by declarative statements 
>   which link together symbols or by the evolution of a shared frame of 
>   reference within which the engines of cognition self-define symbolic 
>   structures.

>There are some areas which I think it would be helpful to expend some thought. 
>We are approaching the second industrial revolution at exactlky the moment when 
>the industrialised world has lost its monopoly on knowledge, capabilities, 
>capital and skill. Billions of people will shortly be able to do what was 
>hitherto restricted to hunders of thousands confined to a few countries. The 
>shape of the industrialised nations will depend on which force dominates and 
>which arrives first. Information systems are the nervous system and substrate 
>of this revolution. 

>I would like to hear peoples' views as to what this might look like: not the 
>trivia of cyberspace, but what, for example, a semi-aware personal computer 
>would look like. Clearly, it would know me and my habits; would be able to 
>prompt me when familiar lines of thought emerge, would troll data streams for 
>things which might interest me; would grow to be more like me as the years 
>progressed. 

>I would like to know what a message would look like two decades from now. I 
>suspect that it would come complete with its own contextuality, linking to what 
>my PC knew of my interests and circumstances such that the message would 
>express its content in ways which would most effectively communicate what was 
>intended. If I received a business brief, for example, then this ought to 
>"infect" my system in controlable ways such that the new information would 
>emerge seamlessly interwoven with what I am doing. I would want my PC to have 
>some idea of how my brain was operating: was I thinking primarily in visual 
>terms or was I operating symbollically; had I got blocked because I could not 
>link a train of thought with a suitable analogy? Was my hippocampus a bit duff 
>this morning: should it offer more associative imagery with the morning's news. 
>And so forth: what  would the outcome of all of this look like?


>Winge:

>This usegroup has a tendency to take big, numinous concepts (quantum 
>indeterminacy, incompleteness theorums..) and connect these up. I once wrote a 
>strategic buzzword generator for a consultant friend: it pumped out phrases 
>such as "we must engage the liberating processes within the human framework 
>such as to empower the strategic reallocation of scare resources in customer 
>oriented ways." Sounds good, means nothing. We have had incompleteness, black 
>holes, time travel and quantum non-localisation connected up at random with 
>free will, the existence of the deity, the adequacy of von neuman architectures 
>and the capacity of animals to lie, to name but a few. These, too, may serve as 
>nouns to be dropped into a computer-generated senstence. I must dig out 
>BUZZWORD.EXE and set it to work.

Has BUZZWORD.EXE ever juxtaposed "mind children" and "pathetic fallacy" in a 
senstence?

:-)


