Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!ucsd!nosc!humu!uhccux!lee From: lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: The difference between machine and human intelligence (was: AI and Intelligence) Message-ID: <2751@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> Date: 4 Dec 88 16:45:24 GMT References: <131@usl-pc.usl.edu> Organization: University of Hawaii Lines: 41 From article <131@usl-pc.usl.edu>, by jpdres10@usl-pc.usl.edu (Green Eric Lee): " In article <960@dgbt.uucp> thom@dgbt.uucp (Thom Whalen) writes: "... " >Do you believe that Helen Keller "understood many ideas and imagery the " >way a human does? She certainly lacked much of the sensory input that " >we normally associate with intelligence. " " Actually, she didn't. Her world was bounded by touch, taste, and " smell. How do you know she didn't? What does it mean to say her "world" was bounded in this way? " She became adept at putting together words to make it seem that " she had the same perceptions as a "normal" person, ... Isn't that what you have done? I think this is what learning language consists in. " but that was more a " sad attempt to "fit in". Another interesting thing is that the " knowledge that things like "blue" existed came via her existing " sensory inputs (touch), specifically from reading books... which seems " to imply that one sensory input can, to large extent, substitute for " others, when there is some convention of information interchange. "... I don't know about this business of "information interchange". Another possibility is that at an appropriate level of processing, different sensory inputs are equivalent. Though I don't say it helps us understand Helen Keller's case, von Bekesy's experiments to establish commonalities between touch and hearing are interesting in this regard. There may be commonalities between vision and speech perception -- there is a three-color theory for both, for instance (for speech, I'm referring to the first three vowel formants). So for perception as well as cognition, it may prove possible to port the human programs to execute on different hardware. Greg, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu