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From: amsler@FLASH.BELLCORE.COM (Robert Amsler)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest
Subject: Re: thinking about thinking not being science
Message-ID: <8707030236.AA29872@flash.bellcore.com>
Date: Thu, 2-Jul-87 22:36:05 EDT
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Posted: Thu Jul  2 22:36:05 1987
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I think Don Norman's argument is true for cognitive psychologists,
but may not be true for AI researchers. The reason is that the two
groups seek different answers. If AI were only the task of finding
out how people work, then it would be valid to regard armschair
reasoning as an invalid form of speculation. One can study
people directly (this is the old ``stop arguing over the number of
teeth in a horse's mouth and go outside and count them'' argument).
However, some AI researchers are really engineers at heart. The
question then is not how do people work, but how could processes
providing comparable performance quality to those of humans be made
to work in technological implementations.  `Could' is important.
Airplanes are clearly not very good imitations of birds.  They are
too big, for one thing. They have wheels instead of feet, and the
list goes on and on (no feathers!).  Speculating about flight might
lead to building other types of aircraft (as certainly those now
humorous old films of early aviation experiments show), but it would
certainly be a bad procedure to follow to understand birds and how
they fly. Speculating about why the $6M man appears as he does
while running is a tad off the beaten path for AILIST, but that
process of speculation is hardly worthless for arriving at novel
means of representing memory or perception FOR COMPUTER SYSTEMS. 

Lets not squabble over the wrong issue.  The problem is that the
imagery of the $6M man's running is just too weak as a springboard for
much directed thought and the messages (including my own earlier
reply) are just rambling off in directions more appropriate to
SF-Lovers than AILIST. I do agree that the CURRENT discussion isn't
likely to lead anywhere--but not that the method of armchair
speculation is invalid in AI.