Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!vtserf!creatures!csgrad!holliday From: holliday@csgrad.cs.vt.edu (Glenn Holliday) Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy Subject: Re: Emergent Properties Keywords: emergence consciousness computability Message-ID: <692@creatures.cs.vt.edu> Date: 6 Nov 90 01:03:46 GMT References: <1265@ucl-cs.uucp> Sender: usenet@creatures.cs.vt.edu Reply-To: holliday@csgrad.cs.vt.edu (Glenn Holliday) Followup-To: comp.ai.philosophy Organization: Virginia Tech Computer Science, Blacksburg, VA Lines: 41 Mike Oliphant said something I like in another thread: >I want to know why I have such a "point of view" >and where it comes from. Telling me that it is subjective and I cannot >objectively investigate it doesn't help any. This is the traditional cop-out The quest to understand emergant phenomena seems to be an approach to a question that may be undecidable: is consciousness/intelligence computable? Building software models of the way we think creates a computational simulation of something that might or might not actually work by a computing (or computing-ish?) mechanism. Clearly, this works some of the times. There are subsystems of the brain that do work that is very much like computation. We can build computations that produce interesting behaviors which appear pretty similar to some behaviors of intelligent, conscious beings. But ultimately, the models we build are approximations of the intellligence we study. Please note -- I'm not arguing either that "It's spiritual so it's impossible" or "It's mechanistic so it's just a matter of time." I'm arguing that we really don't have enough information yet to know whether the intelligent behaviors we want to emerge from AI can be modelled computationally. A couple of empirical observations on both sides of the question. People with specific expertise in these areas, I'd love to hear what you have to say. 1. Natural Language: I thought at one time that since natural language cannot be modelled by any grammar of any complexity, it was a good argument that some of our thought processes are non-computational. I now believe that the ways we fill in the corners, and look up exceptions in our language memory can also be computationally modelled. This example argues that, as we have larger communities of specialist experts processing cooperatively, we can expect interesting intelligent behaviors to emerge. 2. Emotional life: Our firmware, hormoneware and thought processes are at their most entangled when emotional experiences emerge. I have great difficulty imagining how computational processes are going to give rise to the actual experience of emotion. Glenn Holliday holliday@csgrad.cs.vt.edu OR ghollid@access.nswc.navy.mil