Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!agate!garnet!weemba
From: weemba@garnet.berkeley.edu (Obnoxious Math Grad Student)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Who else isn't a science?
Message-ID: <10785@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 11 Jun 88 01:50:33 GMT
References: <13100@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU> <3c84f2a9.224b@apollo.uucp>
Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: weemba@garnet.berkeley.edu (Obnoxious Math Grad Student)
Organization: Brahms Gang Posting Central
Lines: 47
In-reply-to: bjpt@maui.cs.ucla.edu (Benjamin Thompson)

In article <13100@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>, bjpt@maui (Benjamin Thompson) writes:
>In article <10510@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> weemba@garnet.berkeley.edu writes:
>>Gerald Edelman, for example, has compared AI with Aristotelian
>>dentistry: lots of theorizing, but no attempt to actually compare
>>models with the real world.  AI grabs onto the neural net paradigm,
>>say, and then never bothers to check if what is done with neural
>>nets has anything to do with actual brains.
>
>This is symptomatic of a common fallacy.

No, it is not.  You did not catch the point of my posting, embedded in
the subject line.

>					   Why should the way our brains
>work be the only way "brains" can work?  Why shouldn't *A*I workers look
>at weird and wonderful models?

AI researchers can do whatever they want.  But they should stop trying
to gain scientific legitimacy from wild unproven conjectures.

>			         We (basically) don't know anything about
>how the brain really works anyway, so who can really tell if what they're
>doing corresponds to (some part of) the brain?

Right.  Or if they're all just hacking for the hell of it.

But if they are in fact interested in the brain, then they could period-
ically check back at what is know about real brains now and then.  Since
they don't, I think Edelman's "Aristotelian dentistry" criticism is per-
fectly valid.

In article <3c84f2a9.224b@apollo.uucp>, nelson_p@apollo (Peter Nelson) writes,
replying to the same article:

>  I don't see why everyone gets hung up on mimicking natural
>  intelligence.  The point is to solve real-world problems.

This makes for an engineering discipline, not a science.  I'm all for
AI research in methods of solving difficult ill-defined problems.  But
calling the resulting behavior "intelligent" is completely unjustified.

Indeed, many modern dictionaries now give an extra meaning to the word
"intelligent", thanks, partly due to AI's decades of abuse of the term:
it means "able to peform some of the functions of a computer".

Ain't it wonderful?  AI succeeded by changing the meaning of the word.

ucbvax!garnet!weemba	Matthew P Wiener/Brahms Gang/Berkeley CA 94720