Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!lll-winken!uunet!mcvax!ukc!strath-cs!glasgow!gilbert From: gilbert@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Gilbert Cockton) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Where might CR understanding come from (if it exists) Message-ID: <2746@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> Date: 7 Apr 89 09:42:43 GMT References: <2705@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> <3633@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> <2721@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> <322@edai.ed.ac.uk> Reply-To: gilbert@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Gilbert Cockton) Organization: Comp Sci, Glasgow Univ, Scotland Lines: 101 In article <322@edai.ed.ac.uk> cam@edai (Chris Malcolm) writes: >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 Oh yawn, yawn, yawn. OK, knowing how, knowing that, knowing why, all different - freshman epistemology this, but don't let me ryle (sic) you :-) >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. They were making ships, not minds though. If they'd tried to make fish, things would have been different. Ships and steam engines are artefacts with functions, they are not attempts to copy nature. The rest of your argument here falls down because of this simple confusion. Just to make life harder though, "mind" isn't obviously a part of nature in the sense that most people use it (the eternal, that which depends on us not being here). The presence of (the illusion of, for Greg Lee et al.) consciousness, understanding, volition, inspiration and imagination put "mind" out of the normal scope of nature. You're really going to "build" one of these, and say, "well I didn't know what I was doing, but hey I got there, and yeah, it's a mind"? Stop kidding yourself. All examples of artefacts which exploit yet to be undestood phenomena have all been made as tools to solve a narrow problem. This does not apply to strong AI, and your attempt to exploit the analogy does not suggest to me that you have, or indeed want to, think long and hard about the argument. You appear, to me, to be clutching at straws. >mind-meter, but we are all equipped with sufficient understanding to >be able to say "that looks pretty like a mind to me". Sorry, but this is balls - see under animism. There are cultures which give minds to things which ours does not. I suppose they are wrong and we are right? Why not trot down to Portobello at the weekend and ask folk on the beach the following: Which of these have "minds" a) all humans b) Muriel Gray c) Neil Kinnock or Ronald Reagan d) the beach donkeys e) wasps f) slugs g) stroke patients with no mobility or speech h) rivers i) trees j1) god (for atheists) j2) God (for believers) j2 supplementary) the Holy Spirit k) South Bridge l) an intelligent front end to a computer system So what are the right answers? Will we all make the same judgements? If not, then is the Turing Test a sensible basis for a serious research topic? Will the word of one person, enough for Turing, really be enough for research funders? What if ten people are split 8-2 in favour of the computer having a mind? What if the 8 are all children? Come one, let's have some proper criteria for success, not what your mum says. If the Turing Test was THE test, then bring up a wino from Greyfriars today and give him some cans of Heavy to say your robots have minds. Surely that would count as passing the Turing Test? :-) >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. Evidence please. I studied cognitive psychology as part of my first degree ten years ago. I presume the progress has happened since then, because things were very poor then. In the late 1970s, there was considerable contempt for the monkeys and cannibals and other artificial problem solving work, which appeared to be the state of the art at the time. What's changed? >This idea that you have to understand something properly before >being able to make it is a delusion of armchair scientists who have You're right that we didn't use to do things this way. However, the idea that you can let loose a artefact which is not understood these days borders on the immoral. Legally, with changes in product liability, you *MUST* undertand what you have made. Hence the social irrelevance of mcuh expert systems work. If they can't be guaranteed, they can't be used. >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. What have you been eating? My mind is made, that's how I think with it. Your computer mind isn't made, so you can't think with that. You haven't answered the question of how computer modelling of an ill-defined social construct improves our understanding of nature. -- Gilbert Cockton, Department of Computing Science, The University, Glasgow gilbert@uk.ac.glasgow.cs !ukc!glasgow!gilbert