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.