MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award
bostonglobe.com

This comment has never seemed as stunningly insightful to me as it evidently did to Gerry, but it's probably one of those things that is obvious once stated, but not before.

Anyway I'm glad to see Marvin winning this prize.

Its a great anecdote to illustrate how so many have underestimated the difficulty of problems in computer vision in robotics and AI.

My thermostat has three possible beliefs: 1) It is too warm in here. 2) It is too cold in here. 3) It is just about right.

Minsky is wrong about AI in the same way that McCarthy was wrong. McCarthy really "believed" that his thermostat had three possible beliefs, and that his thermostat really "believed" one of them at any given time. http://Books.Google.com/books?id=yNJN-_jznw4C&pg=PA30&lpg=PA...

Searle debunked him, but the message doesn't seem to have gotten out. We are still wasting money on AI.

We are wasting money on AI because we are following the materialist hypothesis: that there is nothing in the universe besides matter and energy, and the interactions between matter and energy. To reject this hypothesis is unthinkable for many, even for most, because the only alternative hypothesis would be that some sort of non-material (spiritual?) stuff must exist.

But the evidence is overwhelming. The evidence cannot be denied.

Linguistics, for example, has always been divided into syntax and semantics. No linguist has ever challenged this taxonomy. Both syntax and semantics are very real.

Computers are syntactic engines. They do syntax. They can only do syntax. It matters if a symbol is present, or not, and it matters in what order symbols are arranged. But the computer does not, and indeed cannot, associate any meaning (semantics) with any symbol. The only way a computer, being only a syntactical engine, can appear to do semantics, is if a human has first been clever enough to have found a mapping in some natural language between syntax and semantics [and such mapping must exist in the first place, for him to find it], and then clever enough to exploit it. The computer is still doing only syntax, even while appearing to do semantics.

Searle showed this also with his Chinese Room analogy. But the "cognitive scientists" have not been paying attention. Or they are still in denial.

But humans really do semantics. Nobody questions this, or challenges it, because it is self-evident. You are doing semantics right now, as you read my comment.

Because humans really do semantics, and computers cannot, humans and computers must be fundamentally different sorts of creatures. The idea that the human mind is software, running on the hardware of a human brain, must necessarily be false. (If it was true, then humans couldn't do semantics either, but they do!)

If this wasn't enough, Nagel (of "What is it like to be a bat?" fame) has shown that the materialistic hypothesis is almost certainly wrong, in his recent book "Mind and Cosmos". http://www.Amazon.com/Mind-Cosmos-Materialist-Neo-Darwinian-...

But the world pays no attention to Nagel either. To do so would be to have a Kuhnian revolution of epic proportions, and that is not "scientifically correct".

So the cognitive scientists, the AI researchers, the biologists, and pretty much everybody in science today, toe the politically correct line. They celebrate Minsky.

They ought to be bringing up the hard questions. That is what real scientists do.

It is easier to be an idiot, because that doesn't put your funding in jeopardy.

I conclude that there are very few "real" scientists. Cue the "no true Scotsman" jokes. But deal with the issue I've raised. Be intellectually honest.