Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!its63b!aipna!rjc
From: rjc@aipna.ed.ac.uk (Richard Caley)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: RE Social Construction of Reality
Message-ID: <40@aipna.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 24 May 88 10:46:35 GMT
References: <3c2b0d98.44e6@apollo.uucp>
Organization: Dept. of AI, Edinburgh, UK
Lines: 34
In-reply-to: nelson_p@apollo.uucp's message of 20 May 88 17:43:00 GMT
Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.44.4 of Fri Oct  9 1987 on aipna (berkeley-unix)


In-reply-to: nelson_p@apollo.uucp's message of 20 May 88 17:43:00 GMT
>Gilbert Cockton says:
>>The idea that there is ONE world, ONE physical reality is flawed . .
>>Thus, to ask if the world would change, this depends on whether you
>>see it as a single immutable physical entity, or an ideology, a set of
>>ideas held by a social group (e.g. Physicists whose ideas are often
>>different to engineers).
>
>  To the extent that we try to map the world onto the limited
>  resources of our central nervous systems there is bound to
>  be a major loss of precision.  This still doesn't provide any
>  basis for assuming that the world is not a physical entity,  . . .

I would like to suggest that at the centre of this disagreement is
an ambiguity in the concept of 'reality' or 'the world'. The 'reality'
which may or may not be out there, of which physicists try to build a
model, which may be made up of quarks or wave functions or whatever is
singular and immutable more or less by definition. The 'reality' which
people confront in their day to day existance is something quite different;
it contains chairs, elephants and some things ( for instance the british
constitution ) which have no _physical_ existance at all and so exist only
as social constructs. 

>  What does this discussion have to do with computers and artificial
>  intelligence?   I think that this topic would go better in one
>  of the 'talk' groups where fuzzy thinking (not to be confused with
>  fuzzy set theory) is more appropriate.
>                                           --Peter Nelson

Any AI system must perform its function in the world of people's everyday
experience. A system which modeled the world as a system of wave functions
might make an interesting Expert System for a physicist, but it would not
be able to cope with going to the supermarket to buy lunch.