Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!munnari.oz.au!yarra-glen!dnk From: dnk@yarra-glen.aaii.oz.au (David Kinny) Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy Subject: Re: AI - the real problem Message-ID: <3035@yarra-glen.aaii.oz.au> Date: 4 Feb 91 05:24:41 GMT References: <22951@well.sf.ca.us> Distribution: comp Organization: Australian AI Institute Lines: 44 mikeb@wdl31.wdl.loral.com (Michael H Bender) writes: >John Nagle writes: > .... There is a bit of hubris in trying to address human-level intelligence > from our present level of ignorance .... > We will not achieve lizard-level competence until we have ant-level > competence well in hand. We will not achieve rodent-level competence > until we have lizard-level competence. And we will not achieve primate- > level competence until we can build rodent-level brains. And until we > have achieved primate-level competence, we will not successfully build a > general-purpose human-level AI. >The only problem I have with this argument is that if we were to just >focus on "building up" AI competence from lower-level components, we >would ignore one of greatest sources of information: our ability to >introspect about our cognitive processes. What is it that leads you to believe that introspection is one of the greatest sources of information about our cognitive processes ? I would regard it as a most unreliable source of information about the true nature of those processes. Man did not develop an adequate theory of human vision from his experience of it, that had to wait for the development of optics, neuroanatomy, etc. and is still a long way from complete. Why then should it be any different with thinking ? Consider the inability of people with certain brain lesions to even be aware that something is wrong. They may have lost completely some function, such as the ability to see in half of the visual field, but they are unaware of the loss, it cannot even be brought to their attention. Perhaps others with a bit more psychology/neurology under their belts could offer some hard data on the value of introspection. It seems to me that introspection produces subjective and unreliable information about a tiny subset of our higher level cognitive processes, and says nothing about the vast bulk of the edifice of intelligence. If we could understand the workings of a lizard mind it would be a major step towards understanding human cognitive processes. -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= David Kinny Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute dnk@aaii.oz.AU 1 Grattan Street Phone: +61 3 663 7922 CARLTON, VICTORIA 3053, AUSTRALIA