Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!inria!joe
From: joe@inria.UUCP (Joe arceneaux )
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: The future of AI
Message-ID: <712@inria.UUCP>
Date: 10 Jun 88 14:53:06 GMT
Reply-To: joe@inria.UUCP (Joe arceneaux )
Organization: INRIA, Rocquencourt, France.
Lines: 56

Eric Green writes:
  1) The human mind consists of mechanism (program) and data (memories),

I think this maybe imposing the computer science frame of reference a
bit strongly.  There are a lot of philosophers who would disagree, and
this is important because, in my opinion, many (most) of the big questions in
this domain are META-physical.

    this into an AI model, and ask a machine to decide which is "best" or 
    which is "right", the democratic party or the republican party. Try to 
    replicate the human decision-making process at the ballot-box. 
  
  Under the above model, your choice is dictated by your past experiences
  (memories) and by various mechanisms operating upon those memories (e.g.
  mechanism: pleasure/security. Memories: Political discussions, which policies
  were best, who was the better speaker, smarter, etc.).
  
  That is, your choice consists of neurons firing in a particular pattern. And,
  if somehow, microseconds before the vote, we had the sum total of your
  knowledge and experience available to us, we could predict exactly how you
  would vote. You could have voted in no other way besides that dictated to you
  by your knowledge and experience and the underlying mechanisms.

I suspect rather strongly that people of Werner Heisenberg's ilk would
disagree with you here.  Remember that Einstein *never did* show that
"God doesn't play dice with the universe."

  Science asserts the exact opposite: That everything can be explained, that
  everything can be modelled, and that the way to gain knowledge is to seek
  these explanations and models.

Whether it is indeed true that everything can be explained is another
question and once again in the philosopher's ballpark.

    Science can do very well with the natural world, but I suspect there is 
    a part of the human being which is strongly connected to a super-natural 
    reality which science has yet to get a grip on. 
  
  Here is where I become certain that you are advocating a certain set of
  religious beliefs (commonly called "New Age", I believe). As I said before,
  the whole underpinning of science is that the world can be explained. That
  approach has yielded every scientific advance in the world today, from the
  wheat upon your table (a scientifically-bread hybrid, high yield), to the car
  you drive to work. There is no reason to expect that paridigm of reality to
  stop yielding results any time soon. On the other hand, the opposite paridigm
  (that there are things that cannot be explained, and to search is to

Well, the statment "yet to get a grip on" is important.  There are
certainly myriad phenomena which defy rational explanation.  But just
as it is wrong to say "Oh, look!  Mystical/Magical/Religious
phenomena!" it is also wrong to assume that eventual explanations of
said phenomena will be satisfying, or even fit into the scheme now
used to [scientifically (:-)] model reality.

Joe
"Use the Source, Luke."