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From: dhw@itivax.iti.org (David H. West)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Can Machines Think?
Keywords: Emergence, biology, logical positivism, Democritus
Message-ID: <4694@itivax.iti.org>
Date: 22 Dec 89 15:32:32 GMT
References: <31821@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> <7880@cbnewsm.ATT.COM> <7853@portia.Stanford.EDU> <3185@uceng.UC.EDU>
Reply-To: dhw@itivax.UUCP (David H. West)
Organization: Industrial Technology Institute
Lines: 21

In article <3185@uceng.UC.EDU> dmocsny@uceng.UC.EDU (daniel mocsny) writes:
>One fringe benefit of being largely ignorant of both metaphysics and
>AI is being blissfully unaware of all the ways I am not supposed to
>think. Exercising this freedom tonight I had the idea (probably not
>original) that an anology may exist between the questions: "Can
>machines think?" and "Are viruses alive?"

I rather the like the quote attributed to Dijkstra (can anyone
provide a hard citation for this?): "The question of whether a
machine can think is like the question of whether a submarine can
swim".

>So perhaps a useful way to view symbol processing systems is not as
>"thinking systems", but rather, "mind viruses".  (My apologies to Dr.
>Rapaport if he has already published a series of papers exploring this
>very notion!) :-)

Richard Dawkins has.  His word for it was "meme", a conflation (I take 
it) of "memory" and "gene".

-David West        dhw@iti.org