On Mon, 09 Dec 1996 Eliezer Yudkowsky <sentience@pobox.com> Wrote:
>I'm grounding the term "self-justifying" after getting a lot
>of sophistry-oid philosophical flack and "proofs" that the
>term is meaningless.
Sounds like a fine idea, but I used no sophistry. When you claim to have a
solution to the deepest problem in Philosophy you should be prepared to
defend it vigorously, have answers to difficult questions, and not just
expect everyone to automatically call you a genius.
>I don't think that the First Cause works that way.
That won't do, how does it work?
>For the last time, the difference between a computer and an
>expert system - say MYCIN - devoted to figuring out WHY a
>patient shows some particular symptoms. One describes a
>generic computer, the other a particular set of programs.
In other words one is a subset of the other and there is no fundamental
difference. In an earlier post I wrote " When I say that A caused B, I mean
that if I place the events observable from my frame of reference in a
sequence ordered according to time, and I find event A in the sequence,
then I will always find event B at some later point in the sequence, and
that's all I mean".
That would seem to easily cover both of you cases. To repeat for the third
time, what's the difference between cognitive and computational causality?
>Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you everything I
>know.
I think you're telling me far more than you know.
John K Clark johnkc@well.com
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