Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!uwvax!rutgers!gatech!purdue!bu-cs!mirror!rayssd!raybed2!linus!mbunix!bwk
From: bwk@mbunix.mitre.org (Barry W. Kort)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Thought/Emotion/Feeling
Summary: Feeling one's way toward thinking.
Keywords: Devils and Angels, Bugs and Features, Chaos and Order
Message-ID: <43767@linus.UUCP>
Date: 21 Jan 89 14:31:41 GMT
References: <1380@tank.uchicago.edu> <43583@linus.UUCP> <7301@venera.isi.edu>
Sender: news@linus.UUCP
Reply-To: bwk@mbunix (Barry Kort)
Organization: Neurotic Netware, Dendrite Faults, NV
Lines: 35

In article <7301@venera.isi.edu> smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu.UUCP
(Stephen Smoliar) gently chides me for being disatisfied with
with my right brain.  Stephen writes:

>In article <43583@linus.UUCP> bwk@mbunix (Barry Kort) writes:
>>
>>I, for one, would love to clean up my inefficient and erratic
>>right-hemisphere and install some decent code.
>>
>This reminds me of a remark from a letter (74) by Rilke expressing his
>reaction to the goals of psychotherapy:  "If my devils are to leave me,
>I am afraid my angels will take flight as well."  Granting that you HAVE
>the sort of right hemisphere you want to "clean up" (and I tend to agree
>with Minsky that one should be suspicious of such brain division), what
>makes you think cleaning it up will improve its performance?  One of the
>nice things about THE SOCIETY OF MIND is the way it makes cases for the
>necessity of indirect connections among the agents, as opposed to the more
>direct links one might find in an efficient and reliable dataflow network.
>That architecture may be "inefficient and erratic;"  but it's robust!  How
>many pieces of efficient and robust hardware do you know?

My suspicion that there is room for improvement comes from the
observation that most of the decent code in my left hemisphere
was stolen from von Neumann architectures.  (I admit it. It was
my computer who, more than anyone, taught me how to think.)
I am looking forward to making friends with the new class of
parallel architectures.  I am hoping they have some good ideas
on how to implement combinatorial logic, intuitionist logic, and
theory construction.

As to efficient and robust hardware, I nominate the now defunct
Bell System Telecommunications Network and the Northeast Power
Grid, which hasn't crashed since 1967.  (Internet should be so solid.)

--Barry Kort