On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 1:47 AM, Mike Tintner <tint...@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote: > Ben, > > I radically disagree. Human intelligence involves both creativity and > rationality, certainly. But rationality - and the rational systems of > logic/maths and formal languages, [on which current AGI depends] - are > fundamentally *opposed* to creativity and the generation of new ideas. What > I intend to demonstrate in a while is that just about everything that is bad > thinking from a rational POV is *good [or potentially good] thinking* from a > creative POV (and vice versa). To take a small example, logical fallacies > are indeed illogical and irrational - an example of rationally bad thinking. > But they are potentially good thinking from a creative POV - useful > skills, for example, in a political spinmeister's art. (And you and Pei use > them a lot in arguing for your AGI's :) ).
I think this example is more about needing to apply different kinds of reasoning rules in different domains, rather than the underlying reasoning process itself being different. In the domain of classical logic, if you encounter a contradiction, you'll want to apply a reasoning rule saying that your premises are inconsistent, and at least one of them needs to be eliminated or at least modified. In the domain of politics, if you encounter a contradiction, you'll want to apply a reasoning rule saying that this may come useful as a rhetorical argument. Note that even then, you need to apply rationality in order to figure out what kinds of contradictions are effective on your intended audience, and what kinds of contradictions you'll want to avoid. You can't just go around proclaiming "it is my birthday and it is not my birthday" and expect people to take you seriously. It seems to me like Mike is committing the fallacy of interpreting "rationality" in a too narrow way, thinking it to be something like a slightly expanded version of classical formal logic. That's a common mistake (oh, what damage Gene Roddenberry did to humanity when he created the character of Spock), but a mistake nonetheless. Furthermore, this currently seems to be mostly a debate over semantics, and the appropriate meaning of labels... if both Ben and Mike took the approach advocated in http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/02/taboo-words.html and taboo'd both "rationality" and "creativity", so that e.g. rationalityBen = [a process by which ideas are verified for internal consistency] creativityBen = [a process, currently not entirely understood, by which new ideas are generated] rationalityMike = [a set of techniques such as math and logic] creativityMike = well, not sure of what Mike's exact definition for creativity *would* be then, instead of sentences like "the wider culture has always known that rationality and creativity are opposed" (to quote Mike's earlier mail), we'd get sentences like "the wider culture has always known that the set of techniques of math and logic are opposed to creativity", which would be much easier to debate. No need to keep guessing what, exactly, the other person *means* with "rationality" and "logic"... ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
