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MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

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Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#31

Post by mikhael »

yc-kjh wrote: post #9

Idiocy: 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 debu…

if i understand you correctly, you seem to believe that qualia definitely affects physical reality. we don't know whether that's true or whether qualia is just a byproduct of physical reality, and given the probabilistic nature of what we can observe physically, we may never know.

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#32

Post by thewarrior »

yc-kjh wrote: post #9

Idiocy: 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 debu…

Don't compilers and type checkers do rudimentary semantics ?

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#33

Post by anigbrowl »

yc-kjh wrote: post #30
anigbrowl wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Searle's whole Chinese Room argument is based on the notion that a Turing-test-passable system for processing Chinese input and responding with syntactically correct Chinese output can be engineered, but the man inside the room won't know what he's doing. This is flawed in two ways. First, it assumes the man in the room can't learn anything about the system he's manipulating and eventually draw inferences about its g…

> I think you ought to try Julian Jaynes' Origin of Consciousness in the Brakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Thanks. I'll buy it and read it.

It's not responsive to AI as such, but it does offer a sufficiently different model of consciousness that it might meet your Kuhnian threshold. I'm not sure that it's right, but it's so elegant that I feel it ought to be.

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#34

Post by Jtsummers »

yc-kjh wrote: post #28
yongjik wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take it as you don't have any evidence that human brain requires anything other than electromagnetism, then.

Au contraire. Since electromagnetism cannot cause intentions, or goals, and since the human obviously has both intentions and goals (teleology), it is clear that the human brain does encompass something in addition to electromagnetism. (The same statement applies to all of the chemical processes involved in the human brain.) Please read Nagle's work. Read Searle's work. Read all of the philosophical literature on "in…

> Since electromagnetism cannot cause intentions, or goals, and since the human obviously has both intentions and goals (teleology), it is clear that the human brain does encompass something in addition to electromagnetism. [emphasis added]

Let's extend this to include chemical reactions (since we know that it's more than just wires and currents in our skulls), and my question becomes: what evidence do you have that this is true?

A few hundred year ago if you had claimed the sun was illuminated by the energy from the massive number of fusion reactions occurring under its surface, no one would have believed you, not least because there was no language at the time to even discuss the physical mechanisms that actually occur. At best you may have been able to persuade people that it was a giant flame, akin to the fire and candle they knew. That doesn't mean that there is some other supernatural thing going on, just that the natural goings on weren't understood.

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#35

Post by Jtsummers »

thewarrior wrote: post #32
yc-kjh wrote: post #9

Idiocy: 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 debu…

Don't compilers and type checkers do rudimentary semantics ?

If I understand yc-kjh's point, their "semantics" are really just more complicated syntactic rules. No real understanding occurs within the code. Or, the code doesn't understand what it's doing it's just doing what it's been instructed to do by us. (On that note, the code doesn't understand anything because the code is a non-entity, it's a thing, like a book or a car engine. A car engine doesn't understand the fuel it's burning or the gears it's turning or why, it just does it because that's what it does.)

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#36

Post by yc-kjh »

al-king wrote: post #26
yc-kjh wrote: post #9

Idiocy: 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 debu…

On the thermostat, I get the impression McCarthy was being a bit obtuse just to goad Searle a little. What he was illustrating is that simple systems can exhibit apparent intentionality while remaining simple. A steam governor or a thermostat are great examples. Living creatures, like the Aplysia californica snail studied by Eric Kandel, make use of analogously pretty damn simple mechanisms for reasonably sophisticat…

I am not agreeing with your argument, but let me play devil's advocate.

If somebody wanted to produce a real AI, every bit as intelligent as a human, he probably wouldn't go wrong by trying to reproduce in software what Pascal Boyer describes in his book "Religion Explained". http://www.Amazon.com/Religion-Explained-Evolutionary-Origin...

Boyer fails, in my mind, in many ways, but at the very least by not providing a solution to the Frame Problem. The Frame Problem looms very large in all of Boyer's descriptions of folk psychology, and how the human mind works. Yet it is completely unaddressed.

For a good explanation of the Frame Problem, see Daniel Dennett's argument "Cognitive Wheels: The Frame Problem of AI" in chapter 7 of "The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence". http://www.Amazon.com/Philosophy-Artificial-Intelligence-Oxf... In this article, Dennett is his own worst enemy, in that he proves that AI isn't possible. (Nobody has solved the Frame Problem yet.)

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#37

Post by vidarh »

yc-kjh wrote: post #9

Idiocy: 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 debu…

> The computer is still doing only syntax, even while appearing to do semantics.

Why do you assume people are not doing the same?

> But humans really do semantics. Nobody questions this, or challenges it, because it is self-evident.

It is no more self evident than your claim that computers don't do semantics.

Your argumentation is circular:

IF computers can't do semantics, and IF humans do, then clearly the humans and computers must be fundamentally different. But your claim that computers can't do semantics (as opposed to, a claim that we don't yet know how to program computers to do semantics) is assuming that humans and computers are fundamentally different - if we are not, and the materalist hypothesis holds, there is simply no basis for assuming that we are fundamentally different (as categories; clearly current computers are not structured as human brains).

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

Less name calling, and more of an argument that isn't resting on a logical flaw might be preferable.

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#38

Post by yc-kjh »

vidarh wrote: post #37
yc-kjh wrote: post #9

Idiocy: 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 debu…

> The computer is still doing only syntax, even while appearing to do semantics. Why do you assume people are not doing the same? > But humans really do semantics. Nobody questions this, or challenges it, because it is self-evident. It is no more self evident than your claim that computers don't do semantics. Your argumentation is circular: IF computers can't do semantics, and IF humans do, then clearly the humans an…

You apparently don't understand how computers work.

There is no "meaning" associated with any variable or its value, and there cannot be.

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#39

Post by Groxx »

yc-kjh wrote: post #28
yongjik wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take it as you don't have any evidence that human brain requires anything other than electromagnetism, then.

Au contraire. Since electromagnetism cannot cause intentions, or goals, and since the human obviously has both intentions and goals (teleology), it is clear that the human brain does encompass something in addition to electromagnetism. (The same statement applies to all of the chemical processes involved in the human brain.) Please read Nagle's work. Read Searle's work. Read all of the philosophical literature on "in…

>... since the human obviously has both intentions and goals ...

You're just arguing past people.

Humans obviously do this, computers obviously don't, therefore computers cannot do what humans do.

There's nothing "obvious" about this. It's a completely subjective interpretation. How do you respond to people who say humans obviously do act precisely like a very-complex computer?

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#40

Post by yc-kjh »

Jtsummers wrote: post #35
thewarrior wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't compilers and type checkers do rudimentary semantics ?

If I understand yc-kjh's point, their "semantics" are really just more complicated syntactic rules. No real understanding occurs within the code. Or, the code doesn't understand what it's doing it's just doing what it's been instructed to do by us. (On that note, the code doesn't understand anything because the code is a non-entity, it's a thing, like a book or a car engine. A car engine doesn't understand the fuel i…

Yes
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