Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!uhccux!lee
From: lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Cog Sci Fi (was: STRONG AND WEAK AI)
Message-ID: <6233@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu>
Date: 18 Jan 90 14:39:48 GMT
References: <1838@aipna.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: University of Hawaii
Lines: 27

From article <1838@aipna.ed.ac.uk>, by cam@aipna.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm):
"   ...
" >>Wherever sensing and action have been locally amalgamated in this sort of
" >>way a barrier is created to the extension of separate sensor and motor
" >>processing hierarchies. ...
" 
" ... it is not in fact a
" barrier, so much as an opportunity not be missed.

I believe there are two issues involving separation/modularity versus
amalgamation noticeable here.  One concerns whether sensing and
action are separable, and the other whether lower levels are
separate from higher levels -- i.e. whether there is a hierarchy.
I must admit to having only a foggy idea about the nature of
these "barriers", but I thought you were saying that there is
a relationship between these issues, to the effect that the need
to process both input and output efficiently requires the
development of a processing hierarchy.  If something like that
is so, it is pertinent to whether we can expect to find that
higher levels of human processing, "thought", are sufficiently
independent of human sensing and acting organs to be emulated
by a program that runs on non-human hardware.

On a small scale, these matters arise in the analysis of language,
where one might see words as the barriers between phonological
and syntactic processing.
				Greg, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu