[lbo-talk] What's at stake?/AI again

[andie nachgeborenen]

I and some others have alluded to connectionism and
neural net theory. Many people in AI think that
non-algorithmic connectionist models will do better in
capuring human thought than the Good Old Fashioned AI
models, which are algorithmic. This is speculative but
there were some promsing results last time I looked,
which is now ten years ago or so. For more info, check
out some recent text on cognitive science.  Btw, all
thinking, algorithmic or not, _can_ be represented as
the output of a Turing machine, but it turns out that
this is not a useful or illuminating fact beyond the
most abstract level of analysis. jks


> 
> After reading several, but not all, posts on this
> topic I haven't really 
> seen any discussions on computational vs.
> non-computational actions. If I 
> am correctly remembering what I learned several
> years ago on the subject of 
> AI, humans are capable of non-computational
> thoughts. Thoughts that cannot 
> be expressed algorithmically. Since an algorithm is
> a computational 
> procedure, basically the action of some Turing
> machine, and this alone is 
> what "drives" computers, computers could never be
> capable of 
> non-computational problem solving or human
> "understanding". 

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