Date: Mon 31 Oct 1988 20:39-EST From: AIList Moderator Nick Papadakis Reply-To: AIList@AI.AI.MIT.EDU Us-Mail: MIT LCS, 545 Tech Square, Rm# NE43-504, Cambridge MA 02139 Phone: (617) 253-6524 Subject: AIList Digest V8 #117 To: AIList@AI.AI.MIT.EDU Status: R AIList Digest Tuesday, 1 Nov 1988 Volume 8 : Issue 117 Philosophy: Oscillating consciousness What does the brain do between thoughts? When is an entity conscious? Bringing AI back home (Gilbert Cockton) Huberman's 'the ecology of computation' book Limits of AI ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 21 Oct 88 23:10:45 GMT From: vdx!roberta!dez@uunet.uu.net (Dez in New York City) Subject: Re: oscillating consciousness > Take it as you want. We know that people can not attend to the entire > environment at once (or, at least that's what the cog. psychologists > have found). No that is not what cognitive psychologists have found. What we have found is: a) people gain as much information from the environment as their sensory systems are able to pick up. This is a very large amount of information, it may well be the entire environment, at least as far as the environment appears at the sense receptors. b) people have a limited capacity to reflect or introspect upon the wide range of information coming in from sensory systems. Various mechanisms, some sense specific, some not, operate to draw people's immeadiate awareness to information that is important. It is this immeadiate awareness that is limited, not perception of, or attention to, the environment. Dez - Cognitive Psychologist uunet!vdx!roberta!dez ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 24 Oct 88 11:28:36 PDT From: lambert@cod.nosc.mil (David R. Lambert) Subject: What does the brain do between thoughts? Discussion history (abbreviated; see AIList for detail & sources): >>> 1) What does the brain do between thoughts? >>> 2) ... there is no "between thoughts" except for sleep.... >>> 3) [Subjects] reported seeing "randomly" blinking lights blink IN RYTHM to a song. Possible concl: consciousness oscillates. >>> 4) Other possible concl: we unconsciously attach meaning to apparently randon patterns (e.g., notice those lit on the beat and disregard others. ... use of tapping, or rubbing motions to influence pace of communications.... P.S. I'd like to know what 'oscillating consciousness' is supposed to mean. As I recall, there are some nice psycholinguistic "click" experiments (I don't know the references--about 1973) which show that the perceived location of a click which actually occurs at a random time during a spoken sentence migrates to a semantic (or, perhaps, syntactic) boundary. Perhaps the brain is actually thinking (processing information) all/most/much of the time. But we PERCEIVE (or experimentally observe) the brain as thinking intermittently 1) because we notice only the RESULTS of this thinking, and 2) do so only when these results become available at natural (irregularly spaced) breakpoints in the processing. David R. Lambert lambert@nosc.mil ------------------------------ Date: 24 October 1988, 20:50:31 From: Stig Hemmer HEMMER at NORUNIT Subject: When is an entity conscious? First a short quote from David Harvey > But then why in the world am I writing this >article in response? After all, I have no guarantee that you are a >conscious entity or not. >dharvey@wsccs I think mr. Harvey touched an important point here, as I see it the question is a matter of definision. We don't know other people to be conscious, we DEFINE then to be. It is a very useful definition because other people behave more or less as I do, and I am conscious. Here it is possible to transfer to programs in two ways: 1) Programs are conscious if they behave as people, i.e. the Turing test. 2) Find the most useful definition. For many people this will be to define programs not to be conscious beings, to avoid ethical and legal problems. This discusion is therefore fruitless because it concerns the basic axioms people can't argue for or against. -Tortoise ------------------------------ Date: 25 Oct 88 09:24:07 GMT From: Gilbert Cockton Reply-to: Gilbert Cockton Subject: Bringing AI back home (Gilbert Cockton) In a previous article, Ray Allis writes: >If AI is to make progress toward machines with common sense, we >should first rectify the preposterous inverted notion that AI is >somehow a subset of computer science, Nothing preposterous at all about this. AI is about applications of computers, and you can't sensibly apply computers without using computer science. You can hack together a mess of LISP or PROLOG (and have I seen some messes), but this contributes as much to our knowledge of computer applications as a 14 year old's first 10,000 line BASIC program. > or call the research something other than "artificial intelligence". Is this the real thrust of your argument? Most people would agree, even Herb Simon doesn't like the term and says so in "Sciences of the Artificial". Many people would be happy if AI boy scouts came down from their technological utopian fantasies and addressed the sensible problem of optimising human-computer task allocation in a humble, disciplined and well-focussed manner. There are tasks in the world. Computers can assist some of these tasks, but not others. Understanding why this is the case lies at the heart of proper human-machine system design. The problem with hard AI is that it doesn't want to know that a real division between automatable and unautomatable tasks does exist in practice. Because of this, AI can make no practical contribution to real world systems design. Practical applications of AI tools are usually done by people on the fringes of hard AI. Indeed, many AI types do not regard Expert Systems types as AI workers. > Computer science has nothing whatever to say about much of what we call > intelligent behavior, particularly common sense. Only sociology has anything to do with either of these, so to place AI within CS is to lose nothing. To place AI within sociology would result in a massacre :-) Intelligence is a value judgement, not a definable entity. Why are so many AI workers so damned ignorant of the problems with operationalising definitions of intelligence, as borne out by nearly a century of psychometrics here? Common sense is a labelling activity for beliefs which are assumed to be common within a (sub)culture. Hence the distinction between academic knowledge and common sense. Academic knowledge is institutionalised within highly marginal sub-cultures, and thus as sense goes, is far less common than the really common stuff. Such social constructs cannot have a machine embodiment, nor can any academic discipline except sociology sensibly address such woolly epiphenomena. I do include cognitive psychology within this exclusion, as no sensible cognitive psychologist would use terms like common sense or intelligence. The mental phenomena which are explored computationally by cognitive psychologists tend to be more basic and better defined aspects of individual behaviour. The minute words like common sense and intelligence are used, the relevant discipline becomes the sociology of knowledge. -- Gilbert Cockton, Department of Computing Science, The University, Glasgow gilbert@uk.ac.glasgow.cs !ukc!glasgow!gilbert -- Gilbert Cockton, Department of Computing Science, The University, Glasgow gilbert@uk.ac.glasgow.cs !ukc!glasgow!gilbert ------------------------------ Date: 29 Oct 88 01:38:57 GMT From: mailrus!sharkey!emv@rutgers.edu (Ed Vielmetti) Subject: Huberman's 'the ecology of computation' book (why is there no sci.chaos or sci.ecology ?) Has anyone else read this book? I'm looking for discussion of what might be labelled as 'computational ecology' or 'computational ecosystems'. Just looking at the relevant references in the two papers I have, the seminal works appear to be Davis and Smith (1983), 'Negotiation as a Metaphor for Distributed Problem Solving' in 'Artificial Intelligence 20', and Kornfeld and Hewitt's "The Scientific Community Metaphor" in IEEE Trans Systems Man & Cybernetics 1981. Followups go wherever - I really don't know which if any of these newsgroups have any interest. My approach to this is based on a background in economics and in watching congestion appear in distributed electronic mail systems. ------------------------------ Date: 31 Oct 88 15:17:14 GMT From: orion.cf.uci.edu!paris.ics.uci.edu!venera.isi.edu!smoliar@ucsd.e du (Stephen Smoliar) Subject: Re: Limits of AI In article <5221@watdcsu.waterloo.edu> smann@watdcsu.waterloo.edu (Shannon Mann - I.S.er) writes: > >Now consider the argument posed by Dr. Carl Sagan in ch. 2, Genes and >Brains, of the book _The Dragons of Eden_. He argues that, at about the >level of a reptile, the amount of information held within the brain >equals that of the amount of information held within the genes. After >reptiles, the amount of information held within the brain exceeds that >of the genes. > >Now, of the second argument, we can draw a parallel to the question asked. >Lets rephrase the question: > >Can a system containing X amount of information, create a system containing >Y amount of information, where Y exceeds X? > >As Dr. Sagan has presented in his book, the answer is a definitive _YES_. > Readers interested is a more technical substantiation of Sagan's arguments should probably refer to the recent work of Gerald Edelman, published most extensively in his book NEURAL DARWINISM. The title refers to the idea that "mind" is essentially a result of a selective process among a vast (I am tempted to put on a Sagan accent, but it doesn't come across in print) population of connections between neurons. However, before even considering the selective process, one has to worry about how that population came to be in the first place. I quote from a review of NEURAL DARWINISM which I recently submitted to ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: This population is an EPIGENETIC result of prenatal development. In other words, the neural structure (and, for that matter, the entire morphology) of an organism is not exclusively determined by its genetic repertoire. Instead, events EXTERNAL to strictly genetic activity contribute ot the develo9pment of a diverse population of neural structures. Specific molecular agents, known as ADHESION MOLECULES, are responsible for determining the course of a morphology and, consequentlty, the resulting pattern of neural cells which are formed in the course of that morphology; and these molecules are responsible for the formation, during embryonic development, of the population from which selection will take place. Those who wish to pursue this matter further and are not inclined to wade through the almost 400 pages of NEURAL DARWINISM will find an excellent introduction to the approach in the final chapter of Israel Rosenfield's THE INVENTION OF MEMORY. (This remark is also directed to Dave Peru, who requested further information about Edelman.) ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ********************