Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!mcvax!ukc!its63b!hwcs!hci!gilbert From: gilbert@hci.hw.ac.uk (Gilbert Cockton) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Goal of AI: where are we going? Message-ID: <128@glenlivet.hci.hw.ac.uk> Date: Thu, 22-Oct-87 11:51:10 EST Article-I.D.: glenlive.128 Posted: Thu Oct 22 11:51:10 1987 Date-Received: Tue, 27-Oct-87 00:59:16 EST References: <178@usl> <549@csm9a.UUCP> <270@uwslh.UUCP> <15196@topaz.rutgers.edu> Reply-To: gilbert@hci.hw.ac.uk (Gilbert Cockton) Organization: Scottish HCI Centre Lines: 75 In article <15196@topaz.rutgers.edu> josh@topaz.rutgers.edu (J Storrs Hall) writes: >In Western thought it has been realized at long and arduous last that >the appeal to authority is fallacious. Tell that to the judge. This understanding of Western social practices seems weak given its confusion of intellectual idealism with social reality. Authority counts for far more than rationality or science. >Experiment works; the real world exists; Not true all the time - scientific method is flawed, as any sophomore who's studied epistemology can tell you. The modern command over nature is due, not to a slavish and unimagintive application of statistical inference and hypothetico-deductive reasoning, but to an engagement which combines rigour, rationality (self-critical candour) and imagination. This view of reality and experiment is very dated and it's time some of us ignored the off-the-cuff dogma of our chemistry and physics teachers (rarely real people :-) ) and caught up with modern Western thinking (and eternal practice). > objective standards can be applied. Even to people. They must be proved objective first though, so this argument is empty. What is an objective standard? I admit the value of the idea, otherwise our concepts of morality would be weakened. But the term is not to be used lightly. "flawed" is not an objective standard, though it can be defined idiosyncratically and after the fact to correspond to standards which are. Calling the human mind "flawed" in essence could be being motivated by a lack of fit with an AI model - now shouldn't this lack of fit suggest the model is flawed and not the human mind? Note that at the end of the day, the unimaginative application of any method is less important than the people who are convinced, and remain convinced over the rest of their life. Science and convincement are not one and the same, and it is the latter which guides human life. >It is true that most AI researchers "believe that >the mind is a machine", but it seems that the alternative is to >suggest that human intelligence has a supernatural mechanism. No, Mind is extra/para-natural - we cannot observe it as we do nature, and thus the values of science do not apply. More spiritual and humanist approaches do. By the way, as a historan originally, I would hold that humanist and spiritual views of human nature have dominated, and continue to dominate, the public thinking on Man. Reductionist mechanical scientists appear to be an ugly minority who have little *respectful* social contact outside their own self-congratulating cliques. >The anti-scientific mentality is an emotional >excuse used to avoid thinking clearly. It would be much more honest >to say "I don't want to think, it's too hard work." There are other interpretations of this. I wouldn't use, for example, predicate logic (and thus Frames, semantic nets, etc), to describe the design process, not because it is too hard, but because it becomes a cretinous tool when describing such a rich human phenomenum. Thus I am not avoiding hard work; I am avoiding *fruitless* work. Many workers in AI would do better if they stopped trying to cram the world into an impoverished computational representation and actually explored the rich range of non-computable knowledge representations (e.g. the Novel, the painting, psalms, the monographs of the liberal arts). If this is all too inaccessible to their critical abilities, they could at least read some of the established works of scholarship on semantics (e.g. Lyons' 2 volumes). >The champions of irrationality, mysticism, and superstition have >emotional problems which bias their cognitive processes. Their minds are flawed This is very sad. I think the author is missing something, somewhere. I cannot believe that those who share a same higher view of humanity are misleading themselves. What does the author's friends think? -- Gilbert Cockton, Scottish HCI Centre, Ben Line Building, Edinburgh, EH1 1TN JANET: gilbert@uk.ac.hw.hci ARPA: gilbert%hci.hw.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk UUCP: ..{backbone}!mcvax!ukc!hwcs!hci!gilbert