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From: MINSKY%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Parallelism & Consciousness
Message-ID: <13330@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 2-Nov-83 10:10:00 EST
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.13330
Posted: Wed Nov  2 10:10:00 1983
Date-Received: Mon, 7-Nov-83 08:43:55 EST
Lines: 31


What I meant is that defining intelligence seems as pointless as
defining "life" and then arguing whether viruses are alive instead of
asking how they work and solve the problems that appear to us to be
the interesting ones.  Instead of defining so hard, one should look to
see what there is.

For example, about the loop-detecting thing, it is clear that in full
generality one can't detect all Turing machine loops.  But we all know
intelligent people who appear to be caught, to some extent, in thought
patterns that appear rather looplike.  That paper of mine on jokes
proposes that to be intelligent enough to keep out of simple loops,
the problem is solved by a variety of heuristic loop detectors, etc.
Of course, this will often deflect one from behaviors that aren't
loops and which might lead to something good if pursued.  That's life.


I guess my complaint is that I think it is unproductive to be so
concerned with defining "intelligence" to the point that you even
discuss whether "it" is time-scale invariant, rather than, say, how
many computrons it takes to solve some class of problems.  We want to
understand problem-solvers, all right.  But I think that the word
"intelligence" is a social one that accumulates all sorts of things
that one person admires when observed in others and doesn't understand
how to do.  No doubt, this can be narrowed down, with great effort,
e.g., by excluding physical; skills (probably wrongly, in a sense) and
so forth.  But it seemed to me that the discussion here in AILIST was
going nowwhere toward understand intelligence, even in that sense.

In other words, it seems strange to me that there is no public
discussion of substantive issues in the field...