Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!venera.isi.edu!smoliar
From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Another letter to the New York Review
Message-ID: <12085@venera.isi.edu>
Date: 28 Feb 90 16:51:47 GMT
Sender: news@venera.isi.edu
Reply-To: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu.UUCP (Stephen Smoliar)
Organization: USC-Information Sciences Institute
Lines: 38
Summary:

In article <3806@uceng.UC.EDU> dmocsny@uceng.UC.EDU (daniel mocsny) writes:
>
>I interpret this to mean that intelligence is not a point, but a
>space, and arbitrarily many intelligences may exist. Thus a simulated
>brain could perhaps deviate substantially from the behavior of the
>real brain, and still appear to behave quite intelligently. There is
>no one answer to the problem of intelligence, and we probably haven't
>exhausted the possibilities yet.
>
I basically sympathize with this position and wish to consider the possibility
that Dan has not gone far enough.  That is, why should the mathematical concept
of "space" be any better for trying to talk about patterns of behavior than
"point" (beyond its capacity to indicate that we are not talking about a single
thing)?  We have a tendency to assume that every word can be associated with an
OBJECT, but we may be deliberately confusing ourselves if we try to assume that
intelligent behavior has the sort of object properties we associate with a loaf
of bread or a jug of wine.  I would argue that the temporal nature of behavior
makes it quite a different "thing" to talk about (to the extent that WHAT
HAPPENS over an interval of time--as opposed to the temporal interval
itself--really constitute a "thing").  I suppose what I am trying to
argue is that we tend to talk about properties which emerge from the
dynamics of a complex system AS IF THEY WERE CONCRETE ARTIFACTS when
we really have no justification for doing so.  Rather than agonizing
over the "nature of intelligence"--as if it were a "thing" which had
a "nature"--perhaps we should be reviewing our vocabulary as it pertains
to talking about ANY form of behavior.

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