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From: G.Joly@cs.ucl.ac.uk (Gordon Joly)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: computer life?
Message-ID: <1484@ucl-cs.uucp>
Date: 3 Mar 91 15:25:48 GMT
Sender: news@cs.ucl.ac.uk
Lines: 59


 Scott Dorsey writes:
 > minsky@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes:
 > >But that shows the great joke in the attempts to "define life" that
 > >have appeared in this newsgroup.  Missing the whole point of how
 > >natural selection produces stuff.  The lesson should be, you can't
 > >define stuff, only words.  And then, as the above illustrates, the
 > >words you define may not have much to do with the stuff you intended
 > >them for.
 > 
 >    Granted, this is a good point.  But manmade systems (like computers)
 > are not evolved, but designed.  Knowing the path by which lifeforms
 > evolved might help us construct an artificial life form, but it's not
 > required.
 >    Computers play chess.
 >
 >    [...]
 >
 >    Only by bandying semantics about can we be sure that the result really is
 > the same.
 > --scott
 > 
 > Postcript:
 >    The [famous AI professor from Georgia Tech, name deleted] method:
 > 
 > 1. This is our computer system
 > 2. It has behaviour X
 > 3. Our definition of intelligence is the posession of behaviour X
 > 4. Therefore our system is intelligent.

Computers play chess; humans play chess better. We also do some other
things, none of which the other mammals do.

(0) revolt
(1) make jokes
(2) make love
(3) make war
(4) think (thinking as distinct from IQ)
(5) (do) physics
(6) create (art and (5) above)

All this in 2.5 million years! Oh yeah, one of our creations was the
computer, c.f. the above message's p.s.

Some see AI as a means to discover some human psychology. Some see AI
as a pragmatic software-engineering construction project. The latter
build some simple tools and then the former say "yes, we have found
this in the minds of our subjects". No surprise. The psychologists
have recently found a positive correlation between myopia and high IQ.
No surprise there either.

Doctor Eliza, where are you now? Probably with Skinner's pigeons and
Lorenz's geese down on the farm.

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

   "I didn't do it. Nobody saw me do it. You can't prove anything!"