On 16/02/2008, Mike Tintner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Computers are basically symbol processors - they can only deal in > >Graphics/Icons-as-Symbolic-Formulae and Images-as-Symbolic-Formulae. They > >cannot deal in whole forms directly as humans do - cannot literally handle > them >and reshape them and put one on top of another to see if they fit. > > Hence the celebrated imagery debate, with Pylyshyn, in order to safeguard > current AI, trying to maintain that the human brain also, like current > computers, reduces images to symbolic formulae in order to process them, > whereas others like > Kosslyn deny this.
You make me wince every time you talk about computers. You seem to have one view of what computers are, which is very mathematical and logically oriented. Maths is just the most efficient language we have thought of to describe how we want the computer to act. A computer could be operated like a giant pipe organ with millions of stops to pull out and it could do exactly the same things as formulaically programmed computers. If you could find the right stop settings. Computers are not symbol processors, what signals they have are not about anything intrinsically. No more so than a neuron firing is about anything, unless you have it embedded in lots of other neurons. We may imagine them as such, but they are, when they get down to it, electrical signal processors just as neurons are chemical signal processors. Really, at some point get some transistors (or logic gates), play around with them and understand that all a computer is, is a huge circuit of those things that can be pre-configured to act like many different circuits of those things. Computers are perfectly able to store and process images, unless you contend what you had in your PDFs weren't images. Will Pearson ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
