I found these really interesting. I recall some 45 years ago I read a book called "Mechanical Man" by Dean Wooldridge (physicist, worked for Bell Labs, Hughes Aircraft, and his own company which became TRW). This book attempted to explain the workings of the human brain in strictly physical terms.
I have often felt that regarding human beings as simply computational machines with running programs and grasping appendages and transducers (speech and hearing) often simplifies interaction with others of my species (and other species as well), and provides an apposite explanation for the rather odd behaviour, that from the perspective of this machine, infects my fellow mammals. This mechanistic view is necessary if we regard AI and AGI as a real possibility. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote : In case you miss the link in the text, this paper is most interesting: http://watarts.uwaterloo.ca/~pthagard/Articles/quantum.pdf http://watarts.uwaterloo.ca/~pthagard/Articles/quantum.pdf ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote : One of my favourite inspirational thinkers holds forth on the problems facing Artificial Intelligence research: To state that the human brain has capabilities that are, in some respects, far superior to those of all other known objects in the cosmos would be uncontroversial. The brain is the only kind of object capable of understanding that the cosmos is even there, or why there are infinitely many prime numbers, or that apples fall because of the curvature of space-time, or that obeying its own inborn instincts can be morally wrong, or that it itself exists. Nor are its unique abilities confined to such cerebral matters. The cold, physical fact is that it is the only kind of object that can propel itself into space and back without harm, or predict and prevent a meteor strike on itself, or cool objects to a billionth of a degree above absolute zero, or detect others of its kind across galactic distances. But no brain on Earth is yet close to knowing what brains do in order to achieve any of that functionality. The enterprise of achieving it artificially – the field of "artificial general intelligence" or AGI – has made no progress whatever during the entire six decades of its existence. Despite this long record of failure, AGI must be possible. That is because of a deep property of the laws of physics, namely the universality of computation. It entails that everything that the laws of physics require physical objects to do can, in principle, be emulated in arbitrarily fine detail by some program on a general-purpose computer, provided it is given enough time and memory. There's more: Philosophy will be the key that unlocks artificial intelligence | David Deutsch http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/oct/03/philosophy-artificial-intelligence http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/oct/03/philosophy-artificial-intelligence Philosophy will be the key that unlocks artificial intel... http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/oct/03/philosophy-artificial-intelligence David Deutsch: AI is achievable, but it will take more than computer science and neuroscience to develop machines that think like people View on www.theguardian.com http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/oct/03/philosophy-artificial-intelligence Preview by Yahoo
