Re: [NTLK] Newton History

Thanks for the reply. Searle's analogy I think is a good illustration of the difference between a computer and a human being in terms of understanding. I am not sure about it proving anything... but the issue is the fact that a human being is a highly organized clump of organic matter, and a computer is non-organic with a completely different structure and function. When emotion/feeling is taken out of the picture, along with a consciousness, semantics is compromised.

Computers are simply empty drones made up of bits of plastic, silicon and metals. Trying to get a structure such as this to emulate a human being is difficult because of this fact. I am sure there are some ways to go about it though, but I am not well versed in AI so I couldn't really say.

As you say, though, approaching it from an evolutionary perspective would seem to be a decent way to further AI, as it is modeled after the progression of human development.

--- On Sat, 2/21/09, Michael J. Hußmann <michael@michael-hussmann.de> wrote:

> From: Michael J. Hußmann <michael@michael-hussmann.de>
> Subject: Re: [NTLK] Newton History
> To: newtontalk@newtontalk.net
> Received: Saturday, February 21, 2009, 10:23 AM
> Ryan Vetter (physicalconstants@yahoo.ca) wrote:
>
> > Well, the problem is isolated to computers having
> trouble with
> > semantics: they really don't understand anything
> at all, they just
> > "compute" (Searle's Chinese Room
> analogy/argument).
>
> The Chinese Room argument (which can be traced back to
> Leibniz' equally
> inconclusive Mill analogy) doesn't prove anything
> except several
> misunderstandings about computer science in general and AI
> in
> particular. And it is not like Searle's position
> attributing
> intentionality to some mysterious "causal
> properties" of the brain would
> answer any questions -- just more handwaving, basically.

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Received on Sat Feb 21 15:15:40 2009