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From: G.Joly@cs.ucl.ac.uk (Gordon Joly)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: AI - the real problem
Message-ID: <1434@ucl-cs.uucp>
Date: 13 Feb 91 18:07:53 GMT
Sender: news@cs.ucl.ac.uk
Lines: 58


nagle@well.sf.ca.us (John Nagle) writes
< 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.  

I am aware of some of this work, from a brush with molecular genetics
in psychiatry. Fascinating to learn that Josie Bloggs and Freda Smith
are ten times further apart, genetically, then say a Caucasian man is
>from a Semitic man or a Negro man.  But I digress...

Will the sequencing of the human genome be a short cut to AI? We just
read the secrets of intelligence off the database?

<       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

``QED: The Boy Who Draws Buildings'' BBC TV, 13 Feb, The Times review says

`` [...] the progress of Stephen Wiltshire, the autistic boy with an
extraordinary gift for drawing. His speciality is buildings, which he
can capture with an architect's attention to detail after studying
them for only a few minutes. He has what psychologists call the
"savant syndrome", which has noting to do with photographic memory or
even intelligence, as his IQ is only half that of normal person [...]''

An example of (exploited!) human beings with talents that do not seem
to "match" with IQ. The cases described by Oliver Sachs are also in
this class. "Seeing Voices" describes people with some form of damage
to the brain; in one case a person believes that all the furniture is
on one side of their room, but give a true description of reality when
signing.

I still beleive that the mammals and us have a missing link. I do not
feel that rats will ever to paint a picture of a bridge, mainly
because they don't want to. And chimps do not have language.

Gordon Joly                                       +44 71 387 7050 ext 3716
Internet: G.Joly@cs.ucl.ac.uk          UUCP: ...!{uunet,ukc}!ucl-cs!G.Joly
Computer Science, University College London, Gower Street, LONDON WC1E 6BT