David Clark wrote:
I agree with Ben's post that this kind a system has been tried many times
and produced very little. How can a collection of "Cats have claws; Kitty
is a cat; therefore Kitty has claws." relate cat and kitty and that kitty
is slang and normally used for a young cat. A database of this type seems
to be like the Chinese room dilemma where even if you got something that
looked intelligent out of the system, you know for a fact that no
intelligence exists. ...
David Clark
I'm not certain that I'm convinced by that argument. I tend to feel
that as we approach the base level, intelligences DO decompose into
pieces that are, themselves, not intelligent. (Otherwise one gets into
an "It's turtles all the way down!" kind of argument.)
Partially it's a matter of definition. Is a thermostat intelligent? To
me the answer would be "Yes, at the most basic possible level" (i.e., I
wouldn't consider a thermocouple intelligent.) A thermostat maintains a
homeostasis, and to me that is one of the most basic kinds of
intelligence. I can easily see that one could have a reasonable
definition of intelligence that was sufficiently specific AND excluded
thermostats as being too basic, but I'm willing to grant to thermostats
a basic amount of intelligence. I'm also willing to grant that to
"logic engines". And to many other things that I see as pieces of an
AGI. They aren't "general intelligences", and I'm not totally convinced
that such things can, even in principle, exist. (Goedel's results seem
to imply otherwise. No system can be both complete and consistent.)
Still, we are an existence proof that something better than we've been
able to build so far is possible. I suspect that we shave on both
completeness and consistency, and that's probably an indication of
what's needed to come any closer than we are.
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