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From: Sara Winge <sara@ora.com>
Subject: Announce: Book excerpt available
Message-ID: <jpeekDBBrx4.D8L@netcom.com>
Summary: "The Future Does Not Compute" excerpt available
Keywords: artificial intelligence
Sender: jpeek@netcom17.netcom.com
Organization: O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
Date: Fri, 7 Jul 1995 02:51:04 GMT
Lines: 59
Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.ai:31207 comp.ai.nat-lang:3571 sci.cognitive:8192

"The Future Does Not Compute," a new book from O'Reilly & Associates,
examines the impact of computers on human consciousness and culture.
Author Stephen L. Talbott addresses the nature of mechanical
intelligence in Chapter 23, "Can We Transcend Computation?" 

Below is Talbott's summary of the ideas presented in the chapter. An
excerpt from the chapter is available on the web, by ftp, or by
email. Please see the bottom of this message for directions on obtaining
the excerpt.
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We must hold together two conclusions:  (1) there are *no limits* to
mechanical intelligence; and (2) there are nevertheless *radical
limits* to the mentality of machines.  This chapter focuses on the
problem of meaning, which now vexes not only cognitive science, but all
of human life and thought.  Once we have understood meaning in terms of
Owen Barfield's "relation of polar contraries," we can see why every
effort to give computers a "sense for meaning" is bound to fail--and
also why we are continually deceived into thinking we have succeeded.
The notion of polar contraries is here brought to bear for the first
time upon the issues of cognitive science, and promises to cut through
the confusions of many previously unresolvable debates.

A subordinate theme, running throughout the book, deals with how our
pursuit of the secrets of machine intelligence may be fatefully nudging
*human* intelligence in certain directions.  Part of the discussion is
prefaced this way:

"We feel comfortable with precision and the abstraction it requires.
You might say they are our destiny.  *Something* has led us quite
naturally down a path whereby our meanings have vanished into
equations, bottom lines, statistics, and computer programs.  The causes
of that historical drift--whatever they are--have proven relentless and
all but irresistible.  It should not surprise us, therefore, if our
effort to grasp hold of meaning in the following sections proves an
uphill struggle.  Yet without such struggle we may eventually find our
consciousness constricted to a vanishing point.  For the polarity
between meaning and accuracy is also--within the individual
consciousness--a polarity between fullness and clarity.  And we run the
risk of becoming, finally, absolutely clear about nothing at all."

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The excerpt is available via:

WEB: http://gnn.com/gnn/bus/ora/features/future/ch23.html

ANONYMOUS FTP: from ftp.ora.com in the directory /pub/products/fdnc.excerpts,
get the files README and ch23.txt.

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Put the following commands in the body of the message:
	open
	cd /pub/products/fdnc.excerpts
	get README
	get ch23.txt
	quit
Type each line exactly; don't add extra punctuation or extra words.
For help, send ftpmail@online.ora.com this single command:  help
For ftpmail assistance from a human, send mail to ftpmaster@ora.com 
