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Article 7245 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: dab@ism.isc.com (Dave Butterfield)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Word Mechanics (was: parts of "Brain and Mind")
Message-ID: <1bcpsfINNh06@smaug.West.Sun.COM>
Date: 12 Oct 92 21:14:55 GMT
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minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes:
>The infant may not have much of an "object
>concept" yet, and might first form a functional-representation for
>"whatever-helps-stop-being-wet-or-hungry-or-cold,etc."  And it is
>conceivable that there could be a hardware "OR" for several such
>discomfort-detectors, and that they have better-than-chance
>connections to some vocal actions.  Virtually all other mammals do!

I suppose one could call it an OR at some level, but I don't
usually think of it that way.  I model the understanding going
on in the infant's mind as not yet having the necessary
appreciation of forms of discomfort to be able to distinguish
between them.  It's like having a thesaurus with not very many
entries, so concepts are only expressable at a course-grained
level.  One could say I "OR" many different colors into "red",
but what's really going on is that I don't have a decision
process or criterion to distinguish among them -- my process
has no "OR" involved, but I only pay attention to the high bits.

Dave
-- 
	I output a string of symbols and I observe the response.


