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From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Left vs. Right Brain <==> Reason vs. Mysticism ?
Message-ID: <7347@venera.isi.edu>
Date: 23 Jan 89 17:51:21 GMT
References: <1511@tank.uchicago.edu>
Sender: news@venera.isi.edu
Reply-To: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu.UUCP (Stephen Smoliar)
Organization: USC-Information Sciences Institute
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In article <1511@tank.uchicago.edu> staff_bob@gsbacd.uchicago.edu writes:
>
>To be fair, I believe that it is safe to say that the left brain is
>not exclusively logical, nor is the right brain completely analogical.
>Minsky is quite correct in his belief that the two halves of the brain
>seem to be much more alike than different. The fact is that the brain,
>taken as a whole, is both logical and analogical. This is not the point.
>The point is that the focus of what is now called 'Artificial Intelligence'
>is today almost exclusively upon the logical, rational, symbol processing
>aspects of human intelligence, while it is clear that a considerable part of
>the human mind seems to be thus excluded from consideration.
>
This is certainly an important point, and I think it is both recognized and
honored in THE SOCIETY OF MIND.  Minsky's K-line theory of memory represents
an attempt to get away from the "propositional" nature of a symbol processing
approach to memory in favor of a more "dispositional" approach.  Of course,
there are a lot of loose ends in what Minksy has written so far;  but THE
SOCIETY OF MIND is deifnitely not confined to the aforementioned narrow view
of artificial intelligence.  Another researcher who has tried to get away from
these narrow confines is Gerald Edelman, who view his selectionism as an
alternative to the symbol manipulation of information processing psychology.