----- Original Message -----
From: Joshua Bell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, March 05, 2001 9:41 PM
Subject: Re: Kant QM, So L3, Gord would be impressed
> 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.
How do these filters work? They cannot work algoritmically, that's been
proven rigorously. Penrose didn't prove it, but he has some nice proofs of
the limits of algorithmic proofs in his book "the Emperor's New Mind"
>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.
The problem is that the human mind doesn't have time to go through and
eliminate all the bad crap to come up with the right algorithm. Take the
game of chess I just played against a human. I know Dennett uses this as a
counter example, but there is a problem with his example. When algorithms
are used, one only goes 4 deep after exploring the same lines 3 deep.
Humans can see a subtle 8 deep combo and miss a simple 1 mover at the same
time.
