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From: paul@ism780.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: A topic for discussion, phil/ai pers - (nf)
Message-ID: <177@ism780.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 17-May-84 00:36:14 EDT
Article-I.D.: ism780.177
Posted: Thu May 17 00:36:14 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 18-May-84 02:29:10 EDT
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#R:wxlvax:-27600:ism780:20200001:000:1385
ism780!paul    May 15 21:04:00 1984

***** ism780:net.philosophy / wxlvax!rlw /  9:28 am  May 15, 1984

> 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.

There are 3 kinds of people in the world: one type believe that humans are
fundamentally different than computers; another type believe that humans are
computers only slightly more complicated than the ones in the big AI labs;
the third type (which I happen to belong to) believe that human brains are
fundamentally computers, but that AI research has barely scratched the
surface of revealing what powerful computers they are.

I would think that once objects can be identified in the first place,
"cross-time identification" by computer (to the same extent that humans can
do it) is *relatively* simple.  It's simply a matter of research being
focused (currently) on specific parts of the general AI problem of "machine
perception".

-- Paul Perkins