Re: Cognution [was Re: Deep Blue - white paper]

Matt Gingell (mjg223@is7.nyu.edu)
Thu, 2 Sep 1999 15:07:47 -0400



From: <mark@unicorn.com>
To: <extropians@extropy.com>
Sent: Thursday, September 02, 1999 1:03 PM Subject: Re: Cognution [was Re: Deep Blue - white paper]

>Assuming that you take yourself to be "intelligent", how do you know that
>you know that you know and that you're not just a pre-programmed system which
>has been programmed to claim that it knows that it knows? I'm not being
>facetious here, I'm perfectly serious: most arguments against AI start by
>claiming that humans have wonderful facilities which computers don't, when
>they have absolutely no proof.

My favorite example of something a human can do that a computer can't is putting a
pillow case on a pillow. From our usual perspective, this seems trivial compared to
playing grandmaster level chess or doing Matlab style symbolic integration - but it
really does turn out to be very, very difficult!

I do believe that the essense of intelligence is computational - claiming it isn't seems like dualism to me. We are, in a sense, preprogrammed systems. What seperates us from Turing
machines though is the program we're running. There's nothing we can do that, in theory, a computer can't. We're just not clever enough to tell it how.

-matt