Ron: Hello Matt, I had just said to Krimel yesterday about how intellectual distinction was illustrated well in Moravec's Paradox. As Moravec writes: "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility." Moravec also wrote "computers are at their worst trying to do the things most natural to humans."
"Encoded in the large, highly evolved sensory and motor portions of the human brain is a billion years of experience about the nature of the world and how to survive in it. The deliberate process we call reasoning is, I believe, the thinnest veneer of human thought, effective only because it is supported by this much older and much powerful, though usually unconscious, sensorimotor knowledge. We are all prodigious olympians in perceptual and motor areas, so good that we make the difficult look easy. Abstract thought, though, is a new trick, perhaps less than 100 thousand years old. We have not yet mastered it. It is not all that intrinsically difficult; it just seems so when we do it." Ron: These problems AI scientists are running into shed some light on the Issue Of the origin of thought. [Krimel] Right, in short computers are very stupid. They are just really fast at it. AI has been slow to develop for all sorts of reason, some of which you refer to above. What has been really valuable has been the effort to, in effect, re-engineer the human brain. This has been a multidisciplinary effort involving philosophers, psychologists, neurophysiologists and computer scientists. The results are commonly referred to as the cognitive revolution. One of the reasons I often seem so cranky here is that it amazes me that anyone could comment of issues of mind without reference to what has been going on in this field. Matt said: Why do we _need_ the idea of an "idea" that's distinct from words? Ron: Words bring with them grammar and this grammar becomes The structure of thought. [Krimel] Absolutely! Structure, not only in terms of grammar, but, in terms of the taxonomic structure of thought; what kinds of thoughts cluster together into an associationistic network. Pirsig's comments on random access and the structure that emerged from his trays of slips go straight to the heart of this. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
