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From: stevens@prodigal.psych.rochester.edu (Greg Stevens)
Subject: Re: Greg Stevens Re: THE BRAIN AND THE BIRTHRIGHT OF A CHILD
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References: <3dkn00$ps7@ixnews1.ix.netcom.com> <1994Dec25.223026.21759@galileo.cc.rochester.edu> <3dm3mo$e52@ixnews1.ix.netcom.com>
Date: Tue, 27 Dec 94 02:28:07 GMT
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In comp.ai, roose@ix.netcom.com (Richard Roose) writes: 
>In <1994Dec25.223026.21759@galileo.cc.rochester.edu> 
>stevens@prodigal.psych.rochester.edu (Greg Stevens) writes: 
>><3dkn00$ps7@ixnews1.ix.netcom.com> roose@ix.netcom.com (Richard Roose) 
>writes:

>>>THE BRAIN AND THE BIRTHRIGHT OF A CHILD
>>
>>Where the F*** does the author get off making these unsubstantiated 
>claims?
>>
>Greg,

>I first considered responding to your post with a comment by comment 
>rebuttal.  But then I reconsidered:

>..your opening remark,

Yeah, I know, I get emotional at times.  I apologize for the remark.

>..your continual demand for citations while providing very few 
>yourself, and none to backup your most vehement and far reaching 
>dismissals (i.e. Far from "accepted."),

Okay.  In many cases I hardly knew where to begin.  But if you want
debates about what intelligence IS, you could turn to any number of
sources which indicate that there is very little consensus (in 
Fransisco Varela's (co. w/ Elanor Rosch and Evan Thompson) _The
Embodied Mind_, they discuss different approaches within congitive science,
ranging from the "conservative" cognitivism, where intelligence is
symbol-manipulation referringto external objects, to emergentism, where
intelligence is an interplay of feature-extraction from input to 
arrive at "relevant" properties (connectionism falls here) to enaction
(the philosophy they espouse) where organisms make differentiations
relevent to themselves as structures independant of "objective"
properties.  The wide range of approaches, not to mention the wide
range of inclusion/exclusion criterion for when a computerwould be
considered intelligent (i.e. some people still go along with the Turing
Test, some people work from modifications of it (Paul Churchland, or at
least he did in an earlier book), some people feel it should be 
abandoned completely.

For references about my claim that people DON'T tend to agree that
connectionism is the way to go to get intelligent behavior, you could
start with Seidenberg, 1993, "Connectionism Models and Cognitive Theory,"
_Psychological Science_, 4:228-235.  Within that paper he cites papers
involved in the "ongoing debate about the place of connectionist models
in cognitive theorizing."

>..your charge of not defining success when several paragraphs farther 
>on, I define it at length,

I have gone back and checked, and indeed you're right.  I apologize.

>.. your irrelevant mumbo jumbo about testosterone activity in
>male and female primates as a result of dominance contests

Maybe I misinterpreted, but it did not seem irrelevant to me.  If you
are really going to create some kind of wholistic philosophy and begin
with physiology (or even begin explanation of it with physiology) it
seems that you may want to know in depth about the physiological
proceses about which you speak.  You were talking about "success" and
to ME, the notion triggered associations with "power" and dominance,
which I know there is literature out there about (in terms of its
biological substrate).

>..and finally your outlandish statement, There is neither scientific 
>consensus about what intelligence is nor about how the brain produces 
>it.  Please refrain from such ridiculous claims.

See my above paragraph for why I was thinking this.  When many of the
AI and Cognitive Science books I've seen begin with a "let's define
intelligence" section, most refer to the wide variety of definitions out
there, and each, when chosing one for the context of the book, has one
different from the last, I would call that "no consensus about what
intelligence it."  When in many of the books I've read I've seen the idea
expressed ranging from "intelligence is just any organism doing what it needs
to to survive" (Maturana and Varela, 1985, _The Tree of Knowledge) to
it being a complex interplay of behaviors which can ultimately be reduced
to neurochemical states (Patricia Churchland, _Neurophilosophy_, I forgot
the date), to it being a complex set of NON-behavioral features (internal
states) that can be reduced to brain states, to it being non-behavioral
features that can NOT be reduced to brain states, AND when there is
much debate about how MEMORY functions (_Neurophilosophy_ covers the
details of the ambiguity of neurological functioning of memory quite well),
not to mention other processes such as creative problem-solving, I'd call
that there being "no concensus as to how the brain brings about intelligence."

>After reconsideration I thought... I wonder what five year old button I 
>hit?

I'm not entirely sure I know what you mean; I'm not entirely sure I want to.

>Your article does not rate a serious rebuttal.

Perhaps it did not.  I'd concede that.  Does this one?

Greg Stevens

stevens@prodigal.psych.rochester.edu

