joanna bujes wrote:
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> If a computer can do anything without a humanly-programmed set of instructions, we can start talking. However, a computer without a program is like a car without gasoline. It just sits there and does nothing. Another way of getting at this is to say that machine "Intelligence" starts at the point where a computer can come up with something that lies outside the permutations of its instruction set. Problem is, it can't. Some humans, on the other hand, can overcome their conditioning.
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This is empirically valid for the present -- perhaps for 'always,' but it has a weakness, which can be illustrated with an experiment anyone can do for herself.
Hold 2 objects in your left hand; hold one in your right hand. Try to make yourself really believe that you are holding a total of 4 objects.
If you succeed, you are hallucinating. That is, something or other has really screwed up your "instruction set."
As Miles and Justin tried very hard to point out in an earlier thread, practically none of the things that biological reductionists try to relate to genes is really "hard-wired." But here we do seem to be coming up against something very much like hardwiring. Unless we have suffered neurological damage, we can't see the seven fingers of our right hand, or mistake a hat for a wife. Or see (and even imagine) a tomato as a pasty gray. I can't "make my brain" see the duck and the rabbit simultaneously. The examples are endless of things that we cannot think no matter how hard we try. Our "instruction sets" preclude it.
Since "real" AI is not going to happen in the lifetime of anyone on this list, Justin's point that its possibility is a useful hypothesis for thinking about human thinking remains more important, I think, than any arguments for or against it.
Many things that are either impossible in principle or impossible in the present era in practice are still very useful to hypothesize as perspectives on the present.
For example. Commodity fetishism is not a psychological state but an objective feature of capitalist society. Hence we cannot now or in the forseeable future either experience or imaguine what it would be like to live in a social order in which commodity fetishism did not exist. Yet it is extremely important to hypothesize that perspective abstractly in order to understand more fully the world we live in.
Carrol
> Joanna
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