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>From: zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Infinite Minds?
Message-ID: <1992Mar21.022154.10084@husc3.harvard.edu>
Date: 21 Mar 92 07:21:52 GMT
References: <1992Mar18.183651.26822@cs.ucf.edu> <1992Mar19.100550.10019@husc3.harvard.edu> <1992Mar20.121238.859@nuscc.nus.sg>
Organization: Dept. of Math, Harvard Univ.
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Nntp-Posting-Host: zariski.harvard.edu

In article <1992Mar20.121238.859@nuscc.nus.sg> 
smoliar@iss.nus.sg (stephen smoliar) writes:

>In article <1992Mar19.100550.10019@husc3.harvard.edu>
>zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes:

MZ:
>>Pardon my intrusion, but what the fuck does Church's thesis (Turing, a
>>student of his, was rather a latecomer) have to do with the claim of
>>digital brain functioning?  As a matter of fact, McCulloch and Pitts, with
>>their semantical finiteness (<=> digital functioning) assumption already
>>implicit in the quaint title of their original AI manifesto, ``A Logical
>>Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity'', made an explicit,
>>specious, unjustified identification of ``computability by an organism''
>>with Turing computability (of course, this didn't stop them from making
>>counterfactual claims contradicting the preceding: ``every net, if
>>furnished with a tape [...] can compute only such numbers as can a Turing
>>machine, [...and] each of the latter numbers can be computed by such a
>>net''; --- pray tell, where does the tape come from?), concluding with a
>>monumental misreading of Church's Thesis by conflating computability and
>>effective computability: ``This is of interest as affording a psychological
>>justification of the Turing definition of computability and its
>>equivalents, Church's $\lambda$-definability and Kleene's primitive
>>recursiveness: if any number can be computed by an organism, it is
>>computable by those definitions, and conversely.''

SS:
>There you have it, folks, right from the (metaphorical) pen of the man who
>urged charity for Hilary Putnam!  Didn't one of our readers comment that you
>only feel charity is deserved by those who agree with you?  It looks like he
>got your number, Mikhail!

I have good reasons to believe that Putnam would be very surprised if you
were to tell him that he agrees with me; still, this only goes to show
that, for artificial intelligentsia, all who don't accept their dogma must
ipso facto think alike.

SS:
>Those of us who have cracked our skulls at one time or another over the
>McCulloch-Pitts paper would hardly deny that it is a sloppy piece of writing
>(or that the sloppy writing does much to obscure the message).  Nevertheless,
>as one becomes more familiar with the general subject matter, one discovers
>that debugging the paper is not that difficult, if a bit tiresome.  This is
>not so much a question of charity as one of a little mental elbow grease.

I believe to have interpreted their message correctly; feel free to
try to disabuse me of this notion.

SS:
>The reference to the tape, on the other hand, is simply a speculative gesture.
>I have never read it as anything more than an attempt to raise the question of
>whether or not such a tape exists at the biological level.  Given the way
>cognitive science has been going, I am not sure that speculation would carry
>much weight any more.

Given the remarkable lack of success cognitive science has been having in
explaining the least of our natural abilities, I wouldn't take its word for
gospel.  More to the point, you seem to have missed mine altogether: it has
to do with M&P's misinterpretation of Church's thesis.  I trust that you
have references to the latter; look it up, if you don't believe me.

>-- 
>Stephen W. Smoliar; Institute of Systems Science
>National University of Singapore; Heng Mui Keng Terrace
>Kent Ridge, SINGAPORE 0511
>Internet:  smoliar@iss.nus.sg


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: Mikhail Zeleny                                                     :
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