William T Goodall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>A mind isn't a clean formal system with a Godel sentence to send it into a
>recursive tailspin, it is a mess of dirty competing heuristics.
And even that might be giving it undue credit. There's a section in
Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines" which talks about our initial
attempts to probe how the brain processes data, and describes pinwheel-like
image processing structures (logical, not physical). Lovely potential for
bits of fractal and/or L-System type expression.
I have to chuckle whenever I read statements like "the human mind must
transcend the limitations of the universe, if we can defeat things like
Godel's theorems". Or we're just reasonably efficient filters of random crap
that - after much training - approximates things like following logical
progressions. Thus, leaping to conclusions is easy. We guess wildly and
filter out the bad crap. Creativity is, IMHO, merely a matter of having
trained filters (which is why even artists usually go to school) and a good
source of random crap.
Joshua
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