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From: nagle@well.sf.ca.us (John Nagle)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: AI - the real problem
Message-ID: <23019@well.sf.ca.us>
Date: 6 Feb 91 18:16:47 GMT
References: <1416@ucl-cs.uucp>
Lines: 30

G.Joly@cs.ucl.ac.uk (Gordon Joly) writes:

>I see a discontinuity in the development intelligence, at the point of
>the emergence of homo sapiens. Perhaps there should be a metric of
>intelligence, with rocks and logs (cf Twin Peaks) at 0 and us humans
>at 1.

      Unclear.  At our present state of ignorance, we can't really
answer this question.  However, opinion in neurobiology suggests
that the brains of mammals differ primarily in quantitative ways.
See "The Evolution of the Brain", by Sir John Eccles, (1988,
Couteledge, London), especially chapter 3, section 3.1.  Results
from dissection, DNA measures of evolutionary distance, and time
required for evolution all indicate that the brains of humans are
not all that different from those of the other mammals.  

      From an AI perspective, this is encouraging, in that if we
can work our way up into the mammal range at all, we may be most of 
the way to human-level AI.  It also indicates that levels beyond
human intelligence might be possible with a similar architecture
but more hardware.


					John Nagle


      


					John Nagle