Richard,:Mike,
When you say "I just believe that our thinking works on different
mechanistic/ computational principles to those of programs" ... What you
are really trying to say is that intelligence is not captured by a certain
type of rigid, pure symbol-processing AI. The key phrase is
"symbol-processing", which has connotations a certain approach to the
representation of knowledge
Richard,
Thankyou for a sympathetic response, but I suggest - in a well-meaning way -
that it would be worth your while giving me credit, if only provisionally,
for a little more intelligence and awareness than you do.
Very briefly, my focus a while back in attacking programs was not on the
sign/ semiotic - and more particularly, symbolic - form of programs,
although that is v. important too.
My focus was on the *structure* of programs - that's what they are:
structured and usually sequenced sets of instructions.No matter how
sophisticated their structure, and/or their capacity to adapt their
structure, they are still structured.
So what I am saying - v. loosely for the moment - is that you *cannot*
employ a programmed/ *structured* approach to *ill-structured* problems -
and there isn't any evidence that humans actually do, or that AGI's can
successfully. Hence it was that the great Herbert Simon himself
distinguished between "programmed" and "NONPROGRAMMED" decisions - his term,
which still obtains to this day in management science, and is not about
symbol-processing. And ill-structured problems, I suggest, are the stuff of
AGI.
As I said, I will set out one last, v. different and systematic presentation
of this POV in a while, which people can ignore or not - I did not mean to
reignite the argument now, and there's no need to comment for the moment.
P.S. Here's one analogy and also much-more-than-analogy of what I am talking
about. As I said in singularity, the new genetics of Venter & co is changing
everything, and will change the way we think about programs too. It's
fundamentally changing paradigms. One way that it's doing this, (which I
didn't mention), is making us think in terms of "self-assembling" genomes.
Now clearly "self-assembly" is a totally different paradigm for thinking
about everything - a paradigm we haven't even begun to master. We don't know
how to create self-assembling machines, only ones pre-assembled according to
a rigid blueprint.,(although we are starting) - and its' pre-assembled
machines that have shaped science's entire view of the world. Nature
mastered self-assembly long ago - with life. But it didn't, I suggest, just
master self-assembling *forms*, it mastered self-assembling *behaviour*.
Computers currently are only capable of programs - pre-assembled behaviour
which must follow a structured blueprint. Human courses of action are by
contrast, self-assembled, as they happen - still more so than biological
forms - examples of "making it up as you go along" without any structured
blueprint. That's what your post to me was. That's what the next minute of
your life and every minute after that will be. And that's what AGI's will
need to succeed and survive. Later.
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