Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!MIMSY.UMD.EDU!chris From: chris@MIMSY.UMD.EDU (Chris Torek) Newsgroups: comp.society.futures Subject: Re: The future of AI Message-ID: <8806170413.AA22763@mimsy.umd.edu> Date: 17 Jun 88 04:13:08 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 81 Let me begin by saying that I think this (yes, it is both) is not the appropriate place for this discussion. That out of the way...: >In article <672@auvax.UUCP> charlesv@auvax.UUCP (Charles van Duren) writes: >>... The scientific method is a religion. Let me try the following definitions: religion \equiv faith faith \equiv [from Webster's ?th ? dictionary] 2b1: firm belief in something for which there is no proof 2b2: complete confidence 3: something that is believed esp. with strong conviction; esp : a system of religious beliefs Let me use a form of `3' above, i.e., `something that is believed with strong conviction'. Then: the scientific method is not a religion. (In point of fact, the scientific method is just a method---one of many possible methods, but one that a large number of people believe works.) Belief in the efficacy of the scientific method, however, is (by my definitions) a `faith' and therefore a `religion'. Recall that the only thing for which I have absolute and utter proof is that `I think, therefore I am.' Anything else---any evidence of my senses---I must take on faith. (Perhaps I am the butterfly, dreaming.) >>... Don't mistake me. I am not denying the value of the scientific >>method. All I am saying is that, as a method, it is only a few >>centuries old, so let us keep it in perspective. Make that `as a systematically defined and applied method' and I will agree. (Not, of course, that those who apply it are any less human, or somehow never err. The scientific method is limited not only by what it is, but also by those who apply it.) >>... Also, the wheel was invented sometime before the scientific >>method, so don't generalize about the scientific method. Dave Caswell answers: >Do you mean to imply that no one did science or followed the scientific >method until one specific date in the past? Did rocks also often float >upwards until the theory of gravity was formalized; what an absurd thought. >There is a difference between an invention and a discovery. Wheels and >science aren't inventions in the same sense. This is tangential to what I see as van Duren's point, which is that `real' things (which, unless they are only your own existence, require some measure of `faith') can be invented, discovered, or described by other methods. (I personally believe that the scientific method is the most efficient method that we can ever use. With an appropriate definition of efficiency, one could compare various methods to prove whether it is the most efficient we have yet found, but without a method to characterise all possible methods, my belief must remain a faith.) >>If you believe that we are mere machines, or that our behaviour can >>be explained in mechanistic terms, I will fight you on the beaches, etc., >>because this is an unacceptable invasion of my very human life. >But don't you realize that beliving that people are articles of faith is >having a much lower opinion of them. People are thinking, reasoning beings >and to degrade reason is to degrade reason and knowledge is to degrade >humanity itself. I happen to believe that we *are* machines, though hardly `mere'. But, at least as yet, there is little that science can say about this. We know only that many things that were once claimed to be impossible for machines are in fact possible. Extrapolation to the extent that anything we can do, a machine could do, is just that---extrapolation; and extrapolation without testing does not make good science. Incidentally, you can always look at it this way: You might as well believe in free will. If free will exists, wonderful! You were right all along. And if free will is just wishful thinking, if all our actions are predetermined, why, then, it was not your fault you were wrong: You had to be wrong; it was predestined. :-) -- In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 7163) Domain: chris@mimsy.umd.edu Path: uunet!mimsy!chris