On May 6, 2007, at 2:27 PM, J. Storrs Hall, PhD. wrote:
The only person, for my money, who has really seen through it is Drew
McDermott, Yale CS prof (former student of Minsky). He points out
that almost
any straightforward mental architecture for a robot that models the
world for
planning purposes will perforce model itself as being excluded from
the
determinism of the rest of the model. The whole theory fits on a
page and you
can read it in McDermott's book ("Mind and Mechanism") or my
rendition in
Beyond AI.
In my humble opinion, McDermott has demolished 3 millenia of
philosophical
mumbo-jumbo, and now that we understand what free will actually
means in a
mental architecture, we should set about the business of
implementing it.
Eh? Unless McDermott first came up with that idea long before he
wrote that book, it is just a rehash of a relatively old idea. It is
a trivial consequence of the elementary theorems of computational
information theory; the necessary mathematics to prove this basic
characteristic is how my copy of Li & Vitanyi introduces Chapter 2.
I agree with the general argument, but unless McDermott has been
making this argument a *long* time, his argument is more of a "me
too" one AFAICT. Perhaps he put his own flavor to it, but the
underlying principle is not particularly new.
Cheers,
J. Andrew Rogers
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