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From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: What's innate? (Was Re: Artificial Neural Networks and Cognition
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References: <3g673d$7pl@mp.cs.niu.edu> <D3Lt79.3A6@spss.com> <3h83sb$7gp@agate.berkeley.edu> <3h86l7$94r@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: Tue, 7 Feb 1995 22:45:57 GMT
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In article <3h86l7$94r@agate.berkeley.edu>,
 <jerrybro@uclink2.berkeley.edu> wrote:
><jerrybro@uclink2.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>> Perhaps this reply is overly facile, but a simple look at the
>> difference in structure between brains and computers should suffice,
>> if not to explain the particular differences in capacities, at
>                        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>> least to make it seem hardly surprising that there would be vast
>> differences.  I don't think Chomsky would agree that such an
>> obvious inference from the differences would fit even the spirit of
>> his theory.

He wouldn't agree with *which* obvious inferences?  I think we'd have to
see exactly how you characterize the difference between brains and computers
before we can see how happy Chomsky would be.

>I want to make clear that I don't think the brain and today's computer
>have merely a slightly different range of capacities, but that
>they are vastly different.  It is true that both the brain and the
>computer can add 342 and 561 to give 903, but (in comparison with the
>computer), the brain can do this sort of calculation only with
>the greatest difficulty, expending a huge amount of energy, and
>using a staggering number of neurons.  Meanwhile, human language does
>not seem to be the sort of thing that a computer can really
>learn, until the day when it becomes far more powerful than it is
>today.  For this reason I find the comparisons recently made
>between language and arithmetic and algebra to be completely without
>consequence.  (I'm not sure what Mark meant about "math", but I
>think he had in mind those operations that even tiny computers do
>thousands of times faster than humans.)

No problems here, except that the statement that "human language does not
seem to be the sort of thing that a computer can really learn [now]"
would presumably surprise AI supporters, since it's basically a denial
of "strong AI".
