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From: gottliej@ma.cs.wm.edu (Jeremy F. Gottlieb)
Subject: Re: Announce: Book excerpt available
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Michael Sierchio (kudzu@pyramid.com) wrote:
: minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) wrote:

: >This sound to me like another book of weak arguments that purport to
: >show that computers cannot ever think....

: And, seemingly, based on the same hyper-reductionist claim that 
: computers cannot approach thinking because we do not fully understand
: what the constituents of thinking are -- tantamount to saying that,
: because we do not understand fully the nature of matter at a subatomic
: level, our attempts to derive a science of life are doomed forever to
: fail.

Except that we aren't programming subatomic particles to act the way
they do, but we *are* the ones programming computers. Thus there is a
certain amount of validity to saying that in order for us (people) to
instill in a computer the capability of thought, we must first
ourselves understand thought and all its manifestations. I think that
the argument is (or should be) less over whether we need to understand
thought in order to make a computer think, and more over when have we
understood thought enough. Otherwise why would a computer scientist/AI
person like Dr. Minsky be hanging out in sci.cognitive and writing
books like _Society of the Mind_? (There's also the fact that
biological processes take place on the molecular and occasionally the
atomic level, but never on the sub-atomic. But we'll leave that one
alone).
	The difficulty with the second question is that we'll never
know when we've understood enough until we have a computer that fools
people into thinking it's human, and even then we might not be sure.

(For the record, I think we're going to have a R. Daneel Olivaw at
some point in time. Just not in my life time, is all).


--
Jeremy Gottlieb				Parallel Computing Lackey
gottliej@cs.wm.edu			William & Mary
gottliej@mathcs.carleton.edu		Dork: Carleton College
"Without C, we'd have BASI, OBOL, and PASAL."

