Richard,
>
> > In this light, my summary would not be a distortion of your position at
> > all, but only a statement about whether an appeal to intuition counts as
> > a good reason to believe.
>
>
Well, I think there are fairly good reasons to believe
the design will work.
So when you said
> Even Ben Goertzel, in a recent comment, said something to the effect
> that the only good reason to believe that his model is going to
function
> as advertised is that *when* it is working we will be able to see that
> it really does work:
you were distorting my actual statement. What I said has, **to you**,
the implication that the only good reason to believe the NM design will
work, will come after the system has been completed and tested and proven
its functionality. However, it does not have that implication **to me**.
Had you said
"
Ben Goertzel, in a recent comment, said something that led me to think
that the only good reason to believe that his model is going to function
as advertised is that *when* it is working we will be able to see that
it really does work:
"
then I would not have complained.
Anyway, I must add that in other domains of science, plenty of research
dollars are (often wisely, IMO) spent based on intuitions.
For instance, no one
really knows how to deliver gene therapy to patients -- yet loads of
research
in this regard goes on, because of the shared intuition that some mechanism
will emerge out of one of the existing lines of research, or some new one.
No one really knows whether all the work going on applying microarrays
and SNPs to study diseases will lead to cures or medications -- but a huge
number of biologists are working on this stuff, out of the intuition that it
will
do so. Still, according to your standard, it might be that the only "good
reason"
to believe these tools can lead to a cure for a disease, will come after a
cure
has been found using these tools.
Just as it's wrong to class evolution in the same category as Intelligent
Design because "it's just a theory"; similarly it's wrong to classify a
system
like Novamente in the same category as, say, an AGI design that a student
might make up over a weekend with an intuitive sense it might work. Both
theories and intuitions can have varying levels of substantiation.
-- Ben
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