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From: peru@soleil.UUCP (Dave Peru)
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc,comp.ai,sci.bio
Subject: RE: Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence (long)
Message-ID: <558@soleil.UUCP>
Date: 6 Jan 89 18:10:09 GMT
Organization: Harris Semiconductor, Somerville, NJ
Lines: 226

Please consider the following thoughts of three people concerning the physics
of the mind.  Notice the difference from the first person and the next two.

COMPUTER SCIENTIST:

In the book "The Society of Mind" Marvin Minsky writes (p.50):

"When people have no answers to important questions, they often give some
 anyway.

      What controls the brain?  The Mind.
      What controls the mind?   The Self.
      What controls the Self?   Itself.

 To help us think about how our minds are connected to the outer world, our
 culture teaches schemes like this:

      (diagram ...)

 This diagram depicts our sensory machinery as sending information to the
 brain, wherein it is projected on some inner mental movie screen.  Then,
 inside that ghostly theater, a lurking Self observes the scene and then
 considers what to do.  Finally, that Self may act--somehow reversing all
 those steps--to influence the real world by sending various signals back
 through yet another family of remote-control accessories.

 This concept simply doesn't work.  It cannot help for you to think that
 inside yourself lies someone else who does your work.  This notion of
 "hommunculus"--a little person inside each self--leads only to a paradox
 since, then, that inner Self requires yet another movie screen inside itself,
 on which to project what *it* has seen!  And then, to watch that
 play-within-a-play, we'd need yet another Self-inside-a-Self--to do the
 thinking for the last.  And then this would all repeat again, as each new
 Self requires yet another one to do its job!

     The idea of a single, central Self doesn't explain anything.  This
     is because a thing with no parts provides nothing that we can use
     as pieces of explanation!

 Then why do we so often embrace the strange idea that what we do is done
 by Someone Else--that is, our Self?  Because so much of what our minds
 do is hidden from the parts of us that are involved with verbal
 consciousness."

MATHEMATICIAN/PHYSICIST/ASTRONOMY:

In the book "Bridges To Infinity" Michael Guillen (Ph.D in physics, mathema-
matics, and astronomy from Cornell University) writes (p.98):

"In his thirteen-page manuscript, "All Numbers, Great and Small," Conway
 begins as Frege began, with a few primitive ideas, including the null set
 and two rules.  The first rule, Conway's logical definition of a number,
 can be visualized in terms of encyclopedia volumes lined up in order in
 a library shelf.  According to the definition, a volume's place in the
 lineup, its number, can be inferred from the set of volumes on its left
 and the set of volumes on its right.  We could determine where volume nine
 belongs, for instance, simply by locating that place where volumes zero
 through eight are on the left and volumes ten through infinity are on the
 right.  Therefore, every volume, every number, has its own niche, determined
 uniquely by the left and right sets.  That's the thrust of Conway's first
 rule.

 His second rule, again explained here in terms of a set of encyclopedias,
 decrees that one number, such as 5, is smaller than (or equal to) another
 number, such as 9, if two things are true simultaneously: (A) all the volumes
 to the left of the first number (5) are less than the second number (9),
 and (B) all the volumes to the right of the second number (9) are bigger
 than the first number (5).  This rule is necessary in order for Conway
 to impose an order on the numbers he creates, beginning with zero: Zero
 is less than 1, so it precedes 1; 1 is less than 2, so it precedes 2; and
 so forth.

 As he does not assume the existence of any numbers to begin with, Conway,
 like Frege, has only the null set with which to start creating the sequence
 of natural numbers.  Consequently, Conway first contemplates the number
 whos left and right sets are both null sets, written symbolically as {}:{},
 He names this *zero*.  That is, in Conway's theory, as in Frege's, nothingness
 is the most primitive realization of nothing.

 After creating the number zero, Conway has two sets with which to continue
 creating numbers: the null set, {}, and the set containing zero, {0}. 
 Conway identifies the number 1 as the number whose left set contains zero
 and whose right set is the null set.  Thus, at this point in Conway's genesis,
 the number 1 is flanked to the left by nothingness and to the right by
 nothing.  To the left is potential already realized (as zero), and to the
 right is potential not yet realized.

 At each point in his creation, Conway always selects the next number as
 the number as the number whose left set contains all the previously created
 numbers and whose right set is the null set.  It's as though he were being
 guided by an image of those encyclopedias.  At each point, the newly created
 volume is placed to the right of all those volumes already shelved and
 to the left of empty space, which in this analogy has the aspect of the
 physicist's vacuum in representing the potential of numbers not yet brought
 into being.  By proceeding in this fashion indefinitely, Conway creates
 the entire sequence of natural numbers.

 From there he goes on, however, to create an infinity of in-between numbers,
 such as the number whose left set contains zero, {0}, and whose right set
 contains one through infinity {1, 2, 3, ...}.  This defines a number somewhere
 between zero and one.  Thus the standard set of encyclopedias, the natural
 numbers, is embellished by an interminable number of in-between volumes.
 And it doesn't stop there.

 Pursuing the logic of his method, Conway is able to create between in-between
 numbers, then numbers between *these*, and so on, literally ad infinitum.
 The result is limitless hierarchies of in-between numbers, never before
 named in mathematics.

 Conway's theory has ineffable graphic implications as well.  Traditional
 mathematical wisdom has it that a ruler's edge, a number line, is a blur
 of points, each of which can be labeled with either a whole number, a
 fraction, or an irrational number such as .1345792 ..., where the string
 of digits goes on forever.  All these points (or their numerical labels)
 together are imagined to form a continuum, with no space between adjacent
 points.  Conway's theory, however, asks us to imagine numbers that fall
 somehow between unimaginable cracks in this blur of points, and between
 the cracks left behind by those numbers, and so on and so on.  With his
 theory, Conway has made credible what many persons before him had merely
 speculated about: there is conceptually no limit to how many times an object
 can be divided.

 Conway's "All Numbers, Great and Small" shows off the boundless potential
 of the null set, but also of the human mind.  Human creative energy, like
 nothing, isn't anything if it isn't potential.  It is also an indomitable
 part of being alive, as countless experiments have documented.  People
 who are deprived of their senses by being floated in silent, dark tanks
 of water warmed to body temperature will hallucinate.  It is as though
 the human mind will not be stilled of its propensity to make something
 of nothing even, or especially, when immersed in nothingness.

 Like a physicist's vacuum, the human mind can be induced to create thoughts
 that come seemingly out of nowhere.  Mathematicians over the years have
 documented this common phenomenon.  The German Carl Friedrich Gauss recalled
 that he had tried unsuccessfully for years to prove a particular theorem
 in arithmetic, and then, after days of not thinking about the problem,
 the solution came to him "like a sudden flash of lightning."  The French
 mathematician Henri Poincare, too, reported working futilely on a problem
 for months.  Then one day while conversing with a friend about a totally
 unrelated subject, Poincare recalled that "... the idea came to me without
 anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it."

 In this sense, the human mind is the real null set in Frege's and Conway's
 number theories; the mathematical null set is but a subordinate entity
 created after the mind's self-image."

PHYSICIST:

In the book "The Turning Point" Fritjof Capra (Ph.D in high-energy physics
from University of Vienna) writes (p.101):

"While the new physics was developing in the twentieth century, the
 mechanistic Cartesian world view and the principles of Newtonian physics
 maintained their strong influence on Western scientific thinking, and even
 today many scientists still hold to the mechanistic paradigm, although
 physicists themselves have gone beyond it.

 ...

 In biology the Cartesian view of living organisms as machines, constructed
 from separate parts, still provides the dominant conceptual framework.
 Although Descartes' simple mechanistic biology could not be carried very
 far and had to be modified considerably during the subsequent three hundred
 years, the belief that all aspects of living organisms can be understood
 by reducing them to their smallest constituents, and by studying the
 mechanisms through which these interact, lies at the very basis of most
 contemporary biological thinking.  This passage from a current textbook
 on modern biology is clear expression of the reductionist credo: 'One of
 the acid tests of understanding an object is the ability to put it together
 from its component parts.  Ultimately, molecular biologists will attempt
 to subject their understanding of cell structure and function to this sort
 of test by trying to synthesize a cell.'

 Although the reductionist approach has been extremely successful in biology,
 culminating in the understanding of the chemical nature of genes, the basic
 units of heredity, and in the unraveling of the genetic code, it nevertheless
 has its severe limitations.  As the eminent biologist Paul Weiss has
 observed:

     We can assert definitely ... on the basis of strictly empirical investiga-
     tions, that the sheer reversal of our prior analytic dissection of the
     universe by putting the pieces together again, whether in reality of
     just in our minds, can yield no complete explanation of the behavior
     of even the most elementary living system.

 This is what most contemporary biologists find hard to admit.  Carried
 away by the success of the reductionist method, most notable recently in
 the field of genetic engineering, they tend to believe that it is the only
 valid approach, and they have organized biological research accordingly.
 Students are not encouraged to develop integrative concepts, and research
 institutions direct their funds almost exclusively to ward the solution
 of problems formulated within the Cartesian framework.  Biological phenomena
 that cannot be explained in reductionist terms are deemed unworthy of
 scientific investigation.  Consequently biologists have developed very
 curious ways of dealing with living organisms.  As the distinguished biologist
 and human ecologist Rene Dubos has pointed out, they usually feel most at
 ease when the thing they are studying is no longer living.

 ...

 An extreme case of integrative activity that has fascinated scientists
 throughout the ages but has, so far, eluded all explanation is the phenome-
 non of embryogenesis--the formation and development of the embryo--which
 involves an orderly series of processes through which cells specialize
 to form the different tissues and organs of the adult body.  The interaction
 of each cell with its environment is crucial to these processes, and the
 whole phenomenon is a result of the integral coordinating activity of the
 entire organism--a process far too complex to lend itself to reductionist
 analysis.  Thus embryogenesis is considered a highly interesting but quite
 unrewarding topic for biological research.

 ...

 Transcending the Cartesian model will amount to a major revolution in medical
 science, and since current medical research is closely linked to research
 in biology--both conceptually and in its organization--such a revolution
 is bound to have a strong impact on the further development of biology."

***

I think it is quite interesting that "The Turning Point" was published
before "The Society of Mind" in reference to Fritjof Capra's comment,
"and even today many scientists still hold to the mechanistic paradigm."

Paradoxically, these three people's thoughts may sound unrelated.  It is up
to you to decide, any comments?