There is overwhelming evidence that computers are able to do tasks that had once been thought of as mental tasks that only human beings were capable of doing.
It is unwise to declare that the boundaries of rational methods are forever fixed because the methods, and the nature of problems that could become proper subjects of the methods, is just too broad. People often redefine the boundaries and divisions between between subjects and between methods and this can become confusing. For example, trial and error methods have often been given labels like, "guess" or "non-deterministic" which seems to suggest that they are different from rational methods. The problem is that we typically combine rational methods and guesswork and the stark division seems like the remnants of some philosophical history. >From my point of view of philosophical relativism, we are not able to define every rational and non-rational part of a trial and error method and the attempt to make a perfect distinction becomes nonsense (ie, from a slightly different but just as reasonable a view.) This comment can be extended to the employment of other would-be non-rational methods as well. Mike's appeal to a "patchwork," for example, is an appeal to a classical rational method. It is a classical component method, where he is defining something in terms of parts. (It is a "classical" method because there are some ancient Greek writings about whether things are composed of parts or not. From Wikipedia: Leucippus and Democritus, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democritus). On the other hand he has sometimes also made an appeal to (transcendent) fluid methods, which at times almost seemed like it was made in opposition to the composition by parts theory. My explanation is that it is a typical relativistic synthesis because neither is adequate but neither can be discarded either. But anyway, I just do not see how his presentation could be considered to be a non-rational discussion (because it follows many paths of rational philosophy) except perhaps through the occasional implementation of some scientific Dadaism. This mechanization of novelty is also a rational implementation. This shows that natural general intelligence is based on rational methods. Jim Bromer ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-c97d2393 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-2484a968 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
