Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
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From: hubey@pegasus.montclair.edu (H. M. Hubey)
Subject: Re: Bag the Turing test (was: Penrose and Searle)
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References: <1994Dec8.000925.27355@oracorp.com> <D0Ip0D.7Gr@spss.com>
Date: Sun, 11 Dec 1994 01:26:10 GMT
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markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:

>Intelligence was once seen as more or less a branch of language and logic.
>IMHO it's much more fruitful to see it as a biological ability, a tool
>evolution's come up with for dealing with the environment and with peers.
>From this point of view physical skills, from vision analysis to 
>motor skills to mechanical abilities, are highly relevant to intelligence;
>and language can be seen as an outgrowth and an enhancement of animal
>intelligence rather than as a fuzzy substitute for predicate calculus.

I think I'm in agreement with you here, assuming that you mean to say
more than this :-).

I think what's happened is this; As has happened plenty of times in the
past, one of the fields which was not yet a science, and which was
the favorite intellectual romping ground of philosophers, all of a sudden
has become invaded by alien types :-).. These alien types come armed
with different kinds of weapons. This field only had psychologists (at
least at the peripheries) before that. Psychologists were busy testing
(using statistics) and the philosophers were busy intellectualizing
(using logic). Now the field has become crowded with math/CS/engineering
types who have rushed in and invaded their territories [included in among
these "barbarians" are biochemists and mathematicians making up mathematical
models of networks, etc]. New fields like Cognitive Science are being
spawned. So at best this anti-AI fad is modern day Ludditism. It's
just the receding end of a revolt that never was, and will be forgotten
soon. Philosophers will discover the ethics of robotics and forget AI,
and the psychologists?n


--
						-- Mark---
....we must realize that the infinite in the sense of an infinite totality, 
where we still find it used in deductive methods, is an illusion. Hilbert,1925
