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From: tesar@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Bruce Tesar)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Against AI
Summary: Programs can work at different levels
Message-ID: <26982@boulder.Colorado.EDU>
Date: 26 Sep 90 15:38:36 GMT
References: <94y2P6w163w@bluemoon.UUCP>
Sender: news@boulder.Colorado.EDU
Reply-To: tesar@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Bruce Tesar)
Distribution: comp.ai.philosophy
Organization: University of Colorado, Boulder
Lines: 42

In article <94y2P6w163w@bluemoon.UUCP> feedback (Bryan Bankhead) writes:

>I may get flamed to death, but I have to say this, although I have a vital 
>interest in the area of AI, in science all pronouncements must be subject 
>to COUNTERVERIFIABILITY.

    I believe this is more commonly referred to as falsifiability, namely,
the idea that a theory is not scientific unless there are conceivable
instances of evidence that could disprove the hypothesis. If that is
what you mean, then I agree completely; in fact, it is a fundamental
tenet of philosophy of science.

>        1/ Intellingence occurs at the wrong hierarchial level 
>                        We may not be capable of programming what is going 
>on in our minds because intellingence is produced at levels our software 
>is not capable of "backstrapping" (a term I just coined) itself to, that 
>is our software may not be capable of instantiating our 'other order' 
>operations in the form that our 'awareness' is capable of processing.
>There are known examples of this in computer sci..  for instance it has 
>been proven that von nueman programming constructs are incapable of 
>determining if they themselves are self terminating.  Other laws of 
>information processing may indeed prevent the recursive instantiation of 
>the 'clockwork' behind our own consciousness.

Are you assuming that programs can only work at one level of
abstraction? If you are, I would suggest you think some more.
It is true that many "AI" programs work directly on objects like
words and high-level concepts. However, if you can define a model
that uses lower level brain-like objects and concepts, then you
could try writing your program with objects at that level. The
thinking here is that you start at the lower level, rather than writing
a program at a high level and trying to get it to "backstrap" to
the lower levels (if I understand what you mean by that term).

> Thank you for your time
>                        B Bankhead


==========================
Bruce B. Tesar
Computer Science Dept., University of Colorado at Boulder 
Internet:  tesar@boulder.colorado.edu