Xref: utzoo talk.philosophy.misc:1860 comp.ai:3129 sci.bio:1771 sci.psychology:1370
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!mailrus!cornell!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!cadre!geb
From: geb@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU (Gordon E. Banks)
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc,comp.ai,sci.bio,sci.psychology
Subject: Re: Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence (long)
Message-ID: <2043@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU>
Date: 18 Jan 89 21:24:43 GMT
References: <564@soleil.UUCP> <1995@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU> <906@ubu.warwick.UUCP>
Reply-To: geb@cadre.dsl.pittsburgh.edu (Gordon E. Banks)
Organization: Decision Systems Lab., Univ. of Pittsburgh, PA.
Lines: 18

In article <906@ubu.warwick.UUCP> mirk@uk.ac.warwick.cs (Mike Taylor) writes:
>In article <1995@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU> geb@cadre.dsl.pittsburgh.edu (Gordon E. Banks) writes:
>>If reductionism allows us to make progress in understanding all parts
>>of the universe we have heretofore investigated, why should the same
>>method not work in the case of the human mind?
>
>Because the human mind is, by its very nature, something that can only
>be observed in its entirety from within, and this viewpoint of conciousness
>that we have is not succeptible to reductionist methods because we cannot
>view the phenomenon objectively.  It is an intrinsically subjective thing.
>
Certainly the mind can not be observed in its entirety from within.
Introspection is a very poor tool for understanding the mind.  If
we were able to understand the hardware (wetware) in which the mind
is implemented, and create simulations which show similar behavior
to minds, then don't you think we would be able to better understand
the natural mind?  Especially since we could perform experiments with
the simulations which we cannot do easily with the mind?