Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!ginosko!uunet!munnari.oz.au!cs.mu.oz.au!ok From: ok@cs.mu.oz.au (Richard O'Keefe) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Knowledge Representation, A thought experiment Keywords: thought experiment Message-ID: <2376@munnari.oz.au> Date: 10 Oct 89 13:22:21 GMT References: <357@massey.ac.nz> Sender: news@cs.mu.oz.au Lines: 94 In article <357@massey.ac.nz>, ARaman@massey.ac.nz (A.V. Raman) writes: > What makes us think that discovering a new mathematical law is any > different from from the creation of zinc sulphate when zinc and > sulphuric acid are mixed? I'm no fan of sociology, but one of the insights which I think is valid is that categories like "knowledge" and "discovery" are socially constructed. For example, we distinguish between the first person to come up with a law (that's "discovery") and later people who go through the same reasoning steps (that's "rediscovery"). Think of the old declension; "I am intelligent, thou art shrewd, he is cunning". > What makes us distinguish > these two events other than the fact that one 'creation' is a tangible > data structure and the other is not. Er, which one is the "tangible data structure"? We non-discovers learn about mathematical laws by attending to symbolic schemes produced by other language-users (data structures); zinc sulphate may be tangible but it's hardly a data structure. There are quite a number of differences. Zinc sulphate can readily be turned back into its original constituents, indeed if they weren't telling my lies in Chemistry 1 it's happening all the time right there in the beaker (or whatever you do your chemistry in). But mathematical laws don't spontaneously decompose into the symbolic structures that went into their production. On the contrary; a long-standing criticism of mathematical writing and teaching is that you are presented with the end results and _don't_ get the original ``components''. Another important difference is that a mathematical law can be translated from one symbolic system to another (marks on paper, speech, hand movements, flashes of light) and still remain ``the same''. Roughly, the point is that zinc sulphate does not originate from a language-user, so it doesn't _mean_ anything. > If a man was reduced to the size of a photon and put inside the > human brain, would he be capable of deducing that his surroundings are > capable of thinking? Photons have a size? New to me. There is an upper bound on information density, and I'd be surprised if a photon could hold more than one or two bits. > Would he observe the electrons flowing from one part of the brain to > another as a thought process? What's the subjective time rate of the observer supposed to be? If it's commensurate with typical subatomic time scales he won't notice anything changing (the polarisation wave of neurons involves ion flow; brain events take place at "chemical" rates rather than "physics" rates). If it's commensurate with the time scales relevant to brain events, he's going to be so confused by his own motion he's not going to observe anything. > Would he deduce that the structured arrangement of the molecules around > him are nothing but information useful to the body to which the brain > belongs? Well, I hope not, because that isn't true. The vast bulk of the structured arrangement of the molecules in the brain is required to maintain the brain cells as living cells. E.g. the cell walls are not information, the blood vessels are not information, the water molecules are not information, ... > Would he observe the external stimuli being passed on to the brain as > information inputs being sent to the processing unit. If he's _inside_ the brain, how is he going to observe external stimuli at all? There are two separate things: X *is* symbolic/information bearing/meaningful X is *perceived as* symbolic/information bearing/meaningful All four possibilities occur. (There's a lovely bit in one of R.A.Lafferty's stories where a character tries to read an orange.) If PhotonMan couldn't perceive information in the brain, so what? A blind man can't perceive information in traffic lights; that doesn't mean they _aren't_ signals. > If what we call creativity is a measuring stone to intelligence, > hasn't Nature ever been as creative as we have. Intelligence and creativity are socially defined categories. The avant-garde of the late nineteenth century identified creativity and degeneracy; claiming that true art had to be "bizarre". IQ tests don't measure creativity. (What have IQ tests got to do with intelligence? Well, they've got "intelligence" in the _name_...) Nature can't be "creative" unless Nature is a language-user; unless the productions of the goddess Natura are capable of _meaning_ something they aren't "creative". > Hasn't it learnt from mistakes, just as we do. No. Unless she can form intentions, Natura cannot make mistakes.