From: utzoo!watmath!cbostrum Newsgroups: net.ai Title: AI's level of operation Article-I.D.: watmath.4393 Posted: Sun Jan 23 01:02:45 1983 Received: Sun Jan 23 01:47:16 1983 There is a controversy associated with all of the "special sciences" as to whether there is a legitimate "level" of existence that is the object of their study, or whether ultimately they are merely doing some sort of physics, and that their science will only become fully understood or legitimate when the ultimate reduction to physics is produced. There is one classical chain which goes: physics, chemistry, biology, pyschology, social science (economics, polisci, etc), where every element in the chain is supposed to be reducible to the previous one. Without disputing this, I would like to know where people think AI fits in, not to the chain, but just in general. A lot of talk in net.misc previously went on all about making nueral models, and watching them evolve, and this sort of thing. This would imply that there is no signifigant "knowledge level" as newell calls it, and that there is no meat to taking what dennett calls the "intentional stance". Or perhaps it merely implies that those positions are too difficult to get results with. Personally I at least hope (and presently believe) that both implications are false. Surely there are signifigant things about intelligence we can learn without going to the low-level brain stuff, and surely there must be signifigant things we can learn on the "higher" level that would actually be IMPOSSIBLE to learn on the "lower" level. It seems to me that AI is predicated upon these optimistic beliefs. What are others thoughts about this?