Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!uunet!psinntp!scylla!daryl
From: daryl@oracorp.com (Daryl McCullough)
Subject: Re: Strong AI and consciousness
Message-ID: <1994Dec2.143356.8747@oracorp.com>
Organization: Odyssey Research Associates, Inc.
Date: Fri, 2 Dec 1994 14:33:56 GMT
Lines: 26

Lupton@luptonpj.demon.co.uk (Peter Lupton) writes:

> AC provides an account of how classification can come about which has
> no dependency upon any logicist notions. Nor does AC depend on
> propositions, content or any such notion. AC is a computational, not a
> logical notion.

I agree with your point that classifications can be judged by their
data-compressing qualities. However, I don't agree that algorithmic
complexity is the right way to form classifications. Algorithmic
complexity as you've defined makes the complexity of data dependent on
the shortest program that can be used to encode the data. The problem
with using the shortest program is that for any finite amount of data,
there will always be silly, spurious correlations. Therefore, if you
use AC to give rise to classifications, there will be correspondingly
spurious classifications. Of course, in the limit as the amount of
data being compressed goes to infinity, presumably all spurious
correlations will eventually disappear, but I thought that your main
point about the benefit of AC was its applicability to finite data.

I don't think that the *only* purpose in classification is the
compression of data.

Daryl McCullough
ORA Corp.
Ithaca, NY
