Xref: utzoo comp.ai:2842 talk.philosophy.misc:1702
Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!cornell!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!cadre!geb
From: geb@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU (Gordon E. Banks)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: Re: Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence
Message-ID: <1854@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU>
Date: 9 Dec 88 13:41:31 GMT
References: <562@metapsy.UUCP> <2732@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> <563@metapsy.UUCP> <1841@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU> <1736@sjuvax.UUCP>
Reply-To: geb@cadre.dsl.pittsburgh.edu (Gordon E. Banks)
Organization: Decision Systems Lab., Univ. of Pittsburgh, PA.
Lines: 19

In article <1736@sjuvax.UUCP> tmoody@sjuvax.UUCP (T. Moody) writes:
>
>The assumption here is that anything that "obeys the laws of nature" [as
>currently understood, or some future set?] is a machine.  I have stayed
>out of the discussion so far, because this is a singularly uninteresting
>conception of "machine," in my view.  If you don't understand "machine"
>in a way that lets you distinguish between, say, trees and clocks, then
>you are taking this word on a long holiday.

Perhaps children would require such a restrictive concept of machine in
order to differentiate trees and clocks, but I do not.  I would be happy
to hear of some other word, broad enough to include trees and clocks
which we could use instead of machine.  The concept as I am using it
is that of a system which is potentially capable of being created,
given sufficient natural (as opposed to supernatural) knowledge of
its workings.  The controversy is over whether humans (and I suppose
plants and animals) are such systems.  I hold that if humans are
such "machines" then it is possible that someday we will be able
to construct an artificial person.