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From: rosen@gloria.UUCP (Jay Rosenberg)
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Re: A topic for discussion, phil/ai persons.
Message-ID: <176@gloria.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 16-May-84 10:10:40 EDT
Article-I.D.: gloria.176
Posted: Wed May 16 10:10:40 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 17-May-84 04:36:20 EDT
References: <277@wxlvax.UUCP>
Organization: SUNY/Buffalo Computer Science
Lines: 37

>  Here is a thought which a friend and I have been kicking around for a while
>  (the friend is a professor of philosophy at Penn):
>  
>  It seems that it is IMPOSSIBLE to ever build a computer that can truly
>  perceive as a human being does, unless we radically change our ideas 
>  about how perception is carried out.
>  
>  The reason for this is that we humans have very little difficulty
>  identifying objects as the same across time, even when all the features of
>  that object change (including temporal and spatial ones).  Computers,
>  on the other hand, are being built to identify objects by feature-sets.  But
>  no set of features is ever enough to assure cross-time identification of
>  objects.  

Just a few quick comments,
1)  The author seems to use perceive as visual perception.  It can not
be a prerequisite for intelligence due to all the counter examples in
the human race. Not every human has sight, so we should be able to get
intelligence from various types of inputs.

2)  Since humans CAN do it is the evidence that OTHER systems can do it.

3)  The major assumption is that the only way a computer can identify objects
is by having static "feature-sets" that are from the object alone, without 
having additional information, but why have that restriction?  First,
all features don't change at once, your grandmother doesn't all
of a sudden have the features of a desk.  Second, the processor can/must
change with the enviornment as well as the object in question.
Third, the context plays a very important role in the recognition of
of an object.  Functionality of the object is cruical.  Remindings from
previous interactions with that object, and so on.  The point is that
clearly a static list of what features objects must have and what features
are optional is not enough.  Yet there is no reason to believe that
this is the only way computers can represent objects.  The points
here come from many sources, and have their origin from such people
as Marvin Minsky and Roger Schank among others.  There is alot of 
literature out there.