Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcvax!ukc!etive!aipna!edai!cam From: cam@edai.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm cam@uk.ac.ed.edai 031 667 1011 x2550) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Where might CR understanding come from (if it exists) Message-ID: <322@edai.ed.ac.uk> Date: 5 Apr 89 18:57:06 GMT References: <2705@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> <3633@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> <2721@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> Reply-To: cam@edai (Chris Malcolm) Organization: University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh Lines: 88 In article <2721@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> gilbert@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Gilbert Cockton) writes: >In article <3633@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee) writes: >>From article <2705@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk>, by gilbert@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Gilbert Cockton): >>" ... As 'mind' was not designed, and not by us more >>" importantly, it is not fully understood for any of its activities >>" ('brains' are of course, e.g. sleep regulation). Hence we cannot yet >>" build an equivalent artefact until we understand it. ... >> >>It doesn't follow. Think of a diamond, for instance. >> >Category mistake. > >Diamonds are > a) concrete > b) 'assayable' - i.e. you can test chemically that X is indeed a > diamond > c) synthesisable by following well-understood chemical theories > >Minds are > a) abstract > b) not 'assayable' - what the word covers is vague. > c) not provably sythesisable becuase of (b) no test for mindhood, > and also no theory of how minds get made and function There are many different kinds of understanding. People are extremely good at fiddling about and getting things to work, using the minimum understanding necessary for the job. Consequently sailing ships achieved considerable sophistication before the theory of aerodynamics was discovered; and steam engines were made to work not only before the theory of heat engines and thermodynamics existed, but in the face of some wierd and quite wrong ideas about the principles involved. And don't forget that evolution has re-invented the optical eye a number of times, despite never having been to school, let alone having a scientific understanding of optics. Richard Gregory in "Mind in Science" argues that not only do people sometimes make working devices in advance of a proper theoretical understanding of the principles involved, but that this is actually the way science usually progresses: somebody makes something work, and then speculates "how interesting - I wonder WHY it works?" So I expect that AI will produce working examples of mental behaviour BEFORE anyone understands how they work in the analytic sense (as opposed to the follow-this-construction-recipe sense), and that it will be examination and experimentation with these working models which will then lead to a scientific understanding of mind. As for "mind" not being assayable, it's a pity nobody has invented a mind-meter, but we are all equipped with sufficient understanding to be able to say "that looks pretty like a mind to me". Even if closer examination or analysis proves such a judgement wrong, subjecting these judgements to analysis such as the Chinese Room argument, and testing them on the products of AI labs, is a good way of refining them. Current ideas about what constitutes mental behaviour are a good deal more sophisticated than those of several decades ago, partly due to the experience of exercising our concepts of mentality on such devices as the von Neumann computer. I don't see any reason why AI, psychology, and philosophy, shouldn't continue to muddle along in the same sort of way, gradually refining our understanding of mind until the point where it becomes scientific. A (new) category mistake? I assert that I will have a scientific understanding of mind when I can tell you exactly how to make one of a given performance, and be proven right by the constructed device, although such a device had never before been built. Unfortunately I don't expect any of us to live that long, but that's just a technical detail. This idea that you have to understand something properly before being able to make it is a delusion of armchair scientists who have swallowed the rational reconstruction of science usually taught in schools, and corresponds to the notion sometimes held by schoolteachers of English that no author could possibly write a novel or poem of worth without being formally educated in the 57 varieties of figures of speech. It also corresponds to the notion that one can translate one language into another by purely syntactic processing, a notion that AI disabused itself of some time ago after contemplating its early experimental failure to do just that. The human mind is fortunately far too subtle and robust to permit a little thing like not understanding what it's doing to get in the way of doing it. Otherwise we wouldn't even be able to think, let alone create artificial intelligence. -- Chris Malcolm cam@uk.ac.ed.edai 031 667 1011 x2550 Department of Artificial Intelligence, Edinburgh University 5 Forrest Hill, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, UK