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From: cs196006@cs.brown.edu (Josh Hendrix)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: My view of intelligence...
Keywords: I and intelligence
Message-ID: <69649@brunix.UUCP>
Date: 23 Mar 91 04:32:16 GMT
References: <13577@helios.TAMU.EDU>
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Organization: Brown Computer Science Dept.
Lines: 51

In article <13577@helios.TAMU.EDU>, rpb0804@venus.tamu.edu (BATES, ROBERT PATRICK) writes:
|> I dunno about this philosophy about intelligence being inbred or evolving.  I
|> personally feel that the brain is a large, organic macrocomputer.  After all,

I just can't let this go by without a response. Let me just say at the outset that I am not trying to get into a flame war over AI vs neural nets, but I disagree with what you say here (although "...I would defend to the death your right to say it," a quote which I may mistakenly attribute to Thomas Jefferson). 

Here's where I disagree:
1. The brain is indeed large (considering the size of its constituent parts, and compared to the brains of other animals), and it is most definitely organic. I have a problem, however, with any sentence, phrase, or other semantically meaningful arrangement that contains the words 'brain' and 'computer' within 10 words of each other, unless the words 'is not a' fall in between :-).

First, nerve cells are actually slow, firing on the order of 10,000 times/second, while the cycles per second of your average Sun workstation is measured in the millions. Second, this means that, to do all the things that we effortlessly do, (walk around, avoid things, etc.) the 'computer' in our skulls have to be massively parallel. Third, this massive parallelism means that the neurons, the 'computing elements', are hooked together very differently from the way CPU's, busses, and chips are. Everything th





at happens in your workstation happens one 'operation' at a time, whereas all of the 'computation' that is going on to allow you to see the screen right now is happening at the same time.

Of course, there's a lot of debate about that last sentence, so I do not claim here to be the final word. But that's what seems to me to be going on.

|> it stores data in "chips" (cells) using electrical currents.  It constantly 

Again, I disagree. Cells may contain information of their own (DNA), but the information that makes up a thought is stored in the connections of many cells.

...Stuff deleted...
 
|> I think that if a system were created with enough storage capacity to hold all 
|> the data it could accumulate through its "senses" (visual, audio, tactile, 
|> etc.) and a sufficient algorithm to process the data, reflexes could be 
|> conditioned.  Independent actions could result from a "library" of reflexes
|> (that's what WE do, after all!).  This would result in an organism as 
|> intelligent as the technology supporting it.  It just so happens that we 
|> haven't caught up with ourselves yet, hmm?

Yes, I suppose if you had the time, money, fast enough CPU (which, I would wager, does not exist yet), and programmers (lots) you might be able to build something that, say, kicks you when you tap its knee. But the CPU would have to be wicked fast to handle things like processing visual data quickly enough to pattern-match an orange blur with the concept 'trash-can', calculating current trajectory of the center of gravity of its body planning a route around in under a second. Yet people do this with ease. 







If I am reading it into your words, forgive me, but it seems as though you intend all of this in a linear, sequential paradigm, which is not the case with the brain. Furthermore, why bother 'conditioning' when you could just program a reaction in? 


|> Another stray thought (or is it really stray?) - Would you consider biological 
|> nerve pulses (pulse, no pulse) a form of digital coding and data transfer? 

There are arguments (that I can only relate, I don't know enough to confirm or deny them) to the effect that a cell is really a voltage-to-frequency converter, and that the frequencies get re-converted to voltage potentials at the other side of the synapse. I would argue that the brain is not a binary thing.


|> If I'm a little behind my time in this concept, shut me up!  But I couldn't 
|> resist jumping into a good AI philosophical discussion...
|> 

I don't intend this as a flame or to try to 'shut you up'. I just come from a different angle and I thought I'd share it. 

|> Roberto
|> RPB0804@TAMVENUS

Josh Hendrix
cs196006@brownvm.brown.edu