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From: geb@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU (Gordon E. Banks)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: Re: Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence
Message-ID: <1844@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU>
Date: 6 Dec 88 14:22:21 GMT
References: <563@metapsy.UUCP> <1841@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU> <286@gargoyle.uchicago.edu>
Reply-To: geb@cadre.dsl.pittsburgh.edu (Gordon E. Banks)
Organization: Decision Systems Lab., Univ. of Pittsburgh, PA.
Lines: 43

In article <286@gargoyle.uchicago.edu> hajek@gargoyle.uchicago.edu.UUCP (Greg Hajek) writes:
>
>Well, it's not immediately apparent that indeterminacy is a function of 
>complexity, in any sense.  

Simple systems of macroscopic dimensions are clearly deterministic,
would you agree?  Thus, any hope for indeterminacy lies in the complexity
of a system being such that the non-analyticity is guaranteed.  For
example, when you stand at the base of a waterfall, you will from time
to time be splashed by jets of water.  But you can not mechanistically
compute when you will be splashed because of the complexity of the system.

>Similarly, no PDP network will exhibit behavior
>that defies a deterministic explanation when run on a computer; indeed, just
>dump every step of processing, and you have a low-level explanation right there
Ah, but the low level explanation may not make any sense of the behavior,
but only describes it.  Making sense of it requires interpretation.  Take
simple backprop programs, for example.  The experimenter knows what the
input and output units are to be, but does not determine the final
successful configuration of the hidden units.  Often, their final state
is a surprise, but still makes sense after interpretation.
>
>>I will ask Serge the same questions I asked Gilbert: if humans are
>>not a machine, what elements are added to the body (which seems to
>>be a physical machine as far as we can tell) which make it otherwise?
>>Are these material or immaterial?  Is there some aspect of human
>>beings which does not obey the laws of nature?
>
>I wasn't asked, but while I'm shooting my mouth off . . . if humans are not
>machines, of course there is no material addition to the body, since that would
>just comprise a different machine.  Nor is there any assumption that humans do
>not obey the laws of nature, but rather that our perspective on the laws of
>nature as being equivalent to the "laws" of physics is erroneous.  This is
>required from a dualist point of view, for instance:  if a non-physical event
>can govern physical behavior, conservation of energy goes right out the window,
>and not just such that (delta E)*(delta t) <= h.
>
This recapitulates Helmholz' reasoning when he decided that conservation
of energy required humans to be machines.  I have yet to see anyone
make a satisfactory argument to the contrary.  Obviously, if one brings
religion or magic into the equation then it opens many possibilities,
but so far no one in this discussion has cited either of those as
their reasons for denying that humans are machines.