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Article 1657 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Subject: Re: Dennett on Edelman--what a total loss
Message-ID: <1991Nov27.031545.11235@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Organization: Indiana University
References: <1991Nov21.145350.5725@husc3.harvard.edu> <JMC.91Nov24203029@SAIL.Stanford.EDU> <57569@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: Wed, 27 Nov 91 03:15:45 GMT
Lines: 48

In article <57569@netnews.upenn.edu> weemba@libra.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener) writes:

>Dennett dismisses Edelman completely, with the claim that Edelman's
>work shows the folly of someone working in the cognitive sciences
>without knowing everything.

That's incorrect.  Dennett likes and respects Edelman's work, even
though he thinks that it's ultimately unsuccessful.  The footnote on
page 268 is a little crass, with remarks that border on the ad hominem,
such as "Edelman has misconstrued, and then abruptly dismissed, the
work of many of his potential allies, so he has isolated his theory
from the sort of sympathetic and informed attention it needs if it is
to be saved from its errors and shortcomings".  But it's also correct.
Edelman's treatment of connectionism, for instance -- a school of
thought that is on the same wavelength, whether he accepts it or not --
is superficial and uninformed enough to be almost humourous.

>And he also professes a very scientific wait-and-see attitude--after
>the Edelman based-models get implemented and tested, he'll only then
>condescend to evaluate them.  As if digital computation hasn't had
>decades of coming up short?

Nothing that Edelman proposes is outside the capacities of digital
computation -- just as nothing that connectionism proposes is, either.
Digital computation has this nice property of being universal, so that
unless you have strong arguments about why very low-level processes
might be uncomputable -- arguments of the kind Penrose would like to
have but doesn't -- then there is little reason to reject the
assumption that the behaviour of biological systems is computable.
Edelman doesn't even begin to make the case.  He just makes a few
waffly appeals to irrelevant arguments by Putnam and Searle, and then
argues that no Turing machine could possibly represent all the possible
events that might come up in a cognitive system -- not recognizing for
a moment that TM's needn't be restricted to explicit representation.

He comes close to saddling AI researchers with the ridiculously strong
claim that "the brain is a Turing machine" (a claim that I note has
been bandied about a number of times in this newsgroup, almost always
by anti-AI proponents looking for straw figures).  All AI needs to hold
is that brain processes can be simulated by digital computation -- a
claim that Edelman doesn't come close to refuting.  At the end of the
day, he's just another guy with a computable theory, albeit one that is
particularly sophisticated in some ways.

-- 
Dave Chalmers                            (dave@cogsci.indiana.edu)      
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University.
"It is not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable."


