Bob the CN writes:
<<While absolutes ought to be avoided, I think AI remains impossible. I refuse
to
<<think of human beings as organic computers. I also refuse to believe we who
do
<<not know who or what we are or where we fit can design a device to connect to
<<something we can't prove the existence of. Nothing I have seen or read
suggests
<<to me there is proof that the subconscious exists. I believe it does, but the
<<
<<evidence is circumstantial.
I heard the head of CSAIL (The Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory at MIT) speak. The AI lab started in 1959 and great progress has
been made with
the bruit force heuristic approach (sometimes using neural networks) but it
has been difficult to impart the common sense of a 3 year old into a machine.
We don't fully understand the neurological basis of cognition/consciousness
but are getting closer. The tools were crude and we couldn't visualize the
neural systems anywhere but form "10,000 feet" above them. Functional MRI and
PET scans got us down to 2000 ft but optogenetics down to 150 ft. One can
follow many neurons at a time
but it is difficult to detect signals through more than a few cell layers in
active 3D live brains. Another breakthrough or two in the tools employed and
we may get there.
There is really no hard evidence that we are anything but our wet-ware. I don't
know how the dualist argument persists. Where is the "ghost in the machine?"
There are many thousands of examples, but screw up the foxp2 gene and the
affected people can't even
form plural forms of nouns out of singular nouns. Even the neurologic basis
of unconscious visual/emotional etc processes are being unraveled.
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/BerlinTreatment.pdf
I think this human exceptionalism regarding both our neural organization
(more than wet-ware) and place in the universe had become hard wired into
western culture. The record so far is dismal--always has been flat wrong.
I blame Thomas Aquinas for formalizing the notion but am sure their are other
culprits.
We are our wet-ware but doesn't mean I admire our certified Neanderthal or His
Mooseness any less, Mike
--
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