Path: utzoo!yunexus!geac!geacrd!cbs
From: cbs@geacrd.UUCP (Chris Syed)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: The future of AI
Summary: AI with a porpoise
Message-ID: <308@geacrd.UUCP>
Date: 17 Jun 88 14:33:28 GMT
Article-I.D.: geacrd.308
References: <53.22AB6402@isishq.UUCP> <4441@killer.UUCP> <10526@sol.ARPA>
Organization: Geac Computers, Toronto CANADA
Lines: 31

In article <10526@sol.ARPA>, ken@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap) writes:
> I think that for ourselves and our creations, both assets and
> liabilities will spring from the same source.
> Ken
 
  Me too. Hegel (who unfortunately majored in obscurity), remarked
  that the same spirit (or mind) worships in religion and reasons in
  philosophy (which to him meant all science). I take this to mean that
  you can't chop up the mind/brain's faculties and come up with isolated
  modes of thinking that would work on their own. 
 
  Reading Ken's posting, I got to wondering - what if we tried to make
  a machine think like, say, a porpoise or a gorilla? I see a connection
  between that and trying to create one that thinks pure logic. We can
  certainly make one that _behaves as we see porpoises behaving_, or
  expert systems that drive railway trains like engineers do.... but
  will they think like engineers do at the ball game or the symphony? 
  I think that eventually, we can build a "complete porpoise machine",
  but that still won't solve the basic problem.

  We don't think pure logic because our perceptions of 'observable
  reality' are the inputs, and they're integral to the judgements we
  make about what we see. Flip this around, and you come up with the
  idea that there ain't no pure logic _that we can know about_ - just human
  logic, or Canopean or gorilla logic. To 'really' deal with 'objective 
  truth', we or our machines would somehow have to get 'outside' the
  universe and look in... etc. etc. This is what led Hegel, for example,
  to his conclusion that 'phenomenology' (the art of reasoning in the 
  world of appearances), was the way to go.

      {uunet!mnetor,yunexus,utgpu} !geac!geacrd!cbs (Chris Syed)