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AIList Digest Volume 4 Issue 175
AIList Digest Friday, 1 Aug 1986 Volume 4 : Issue 175
Today's Topics:
Administrivia - Digest Schedule,
Discussion Lists - Natural Language and Knowledge Representation &
PSYCHNET Address Correction,
Philosophy - Translations & Philosophy Journal Style &
Searle and Understanding & McLuhan's Sports Analogy &
Conservation of Information
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu 31 Jul 86 17:13:19-PDT
From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-STRIPE.ARPA>
Reply-to: AIList-Request@SRI-AI.ARPA
Subject: Digest Schedule
The digest has been a little delayed this week because I've been
ill. I'm getting back on my feet now, but starting August 13
I'll be doing some traveling for a month. UUCP net.ai will still
function, but AIList digests will be halted until mid September.
The following announcement of Brad Miller's NL-KR list may provide
interim relief for the network junkies among us. I appreciate his
willingness to take over AIList topics that deserve their own forum.
-- Ken Laws
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 28 Jul 86 16:10 EDT
From: Brad Miller <miller@UR-ACORN.ARPA>
Subject: New List formed on Natural Language and Knowledge Representation
As most of you know, Ken Laws has been getting swamped with AIList
duties, and has asked for help. In this vein, I am starting a separate
list to deal exclusively with the Natural Language and Knowledge
Representation subfields of AI.
Since the scope of this list will be much narrower than the AIList, I
welcome postings from disciplines throughout cognitive science that are
related to these areas. I feel that AI is more of a conglomeration of
several diverse fields than it is a field unto itself, so this sort of
diversity is necessary.
More specifically, here are some details:
You may submit material for the digest to nl-kr@rochester.arpa .
Digests are sent to Arpanet readers and USENET readers as appropriate.
(There are no current plans for forwarding to the UUCP news system.)
Administrative requests (including asking to be included on the
list) should be sent to nl-kr-request@rochester.arpa . Archival copies
of all digests will be kept; feel free to ask nl-kr-request for recent
back issues.
NL-KR is open to discussion of any topic related to the natural
language (both understanding and generation) and knowledge
representation, both as subfields of AI. My own related interests are
primarily in
Knowledge Representation Natural Language Understanding
Discourse Understanding Philosophy of Language
Plan Recognition Computational Linguistics
Contributions are also welcome on topics such as
Cognitive Psychology (as related to NL/KR)
Human Perception (same)
Linguistics
Machine Translation
Computer and Information Science (as may be used to implement
various NL systems)
Logic Programming (same)
Contributions may be anything from tutorials to speculation. In
particular, the following are sought:
Abstracts Reviews
Lab Descriptions Research Overviews
Work Planned or in Progress Half-Baked Ideas
Conference Announcements Conference Reports
Bibliographies History of NL/KR
Puzzles and Unsolved Problems Anecdotes, Jokes, and Poems
Queries and Requests Address Changes (Bindings)
This list is in some sense a spin-off of the AIList, and as such, a
certain amount of overlap is expected. The primary concentration of this
list should be NL and KR, that is, natural language (be it
understanding, generation, recognition, parsing, semantics, pragmatics,
etc.) and how we should represent knowledge (aquisition, access,
completeness, etc. are all valid issues). Topics I deem to be outside
the general scope of this list will be forwarded to AIList (or other
more appropriate list) or rejected.
Bradford Miller
University of Rochester
Computer Science Department
miller@rochester.arpa
[Note: Grateful acknowledgement is given to Dr. Kenneth Laws of SRI for
permission to use an edited version of his AIList welcoming message.]
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 26 Jul 86 14:35:16 CDT
From: Psychnet <EPSYNET%UHUPVM1.BITNET@WISCVM.ARPA>
Reply-to: EPSYNET%UHUPVM1.BITNET@WISCVM.ARPA
Subject: PSYCHNET Correction
To contact psychnet the userid is
EPSYNET
and not
EPSYCHNET.
Yours truly,
Bob Morecock, Editor
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 86 17:19:20 bst
From: Gordon Joly <gcj%qmc-ori.uucp@Cs.Ucl.AC.UK>
Subject: "Metamorphosis" -- (A Common Sense Chinese Room Analogy).
The Steven Berkoff production of "Metamorphosis" has recently
returned to the London stage. A reviewer has pointed out that
the play lacks many of the levels of meaning in Kafka's work,
as a result of its transformation into a theatrical work. The
reviewer was probably thinking of the English translation of
the text from the original German and it has been pointed out
that the translation the original language was responsible for
a considerable loss of substance. Apparently, the true impact
of the work can only be grasped by a native speaker, who has
a background of the German culture.
Gordon Joly.
INET: gcj%maths.qmc.ac.uk%cs.qmc.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk
EARN: gcj%UK.AC.QMC.MATHS%UK.AC.QMC.CS@AC.UK
UUCP: ...!seismo!ukc!qmc-ori!gcj
also: joly%surrey.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk
[In Contact, Carl Sagan quotes a line about reading a translation
being similar to viewing a tapestry from the back. -- KIL]
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 28 Jul 86 14:27:03 EDT
From: "Col. G. L. Sicherman" <colonel%buffalo.csnet@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA>
Subject: Re: philosophy journals
In article <8607211801.AA17444@ellie.SUNYAB>, rapaport@buffalo.CSNET
("William J. Rapaport") writes:
> The original version of the ... problem may be found in:
> Jackson, "Epiphenomenal Qualia," _Philosophical Q._ 32(1982)127-136.
> with replies in:
> Churchland, "Reduction, Qualia, and the Direct Introspection of
> Brain States," _J. of Philosophy_ 82(1985)8-28.
> Jackson, "What Mary Didn't Know," _J. of Philosophy_ 83(1986)291-95.
> (One of the reasons I stopped reading net.philosophy was that its
> correspondents seemed not to know about what was going on in philosophy
> journals!)
Out of curiosity I hunted up the third article on the way back from lunch.
It's aggressive and condescending; any sympathy I might have felt for
the author's argument was repulsed by his sophomoric writing. I hope it's
not typical of the writing in philosophy journals.
------------------------------
Date: 25 Jul 86 10:21 PDT
From: Newman.pasa@Xerox.COM
Subject: Re: Searle and understanding
Eyal Mozes quotes from Searle to explain how Searle thinks about human
understanding and its biological nature. I had seen that passage of
Searle's before, and I think that this is a major part of my problem
with Searle. He accepts the biological nature of thought and mind, yet
cannot accept the proposition that a computer can reproduce the
necessary features of these items. I cannot see any reason to believe
that Searle's position is correct. More importantly, I can see many
reasons why his position is incorrect.
Searle uses milk and sugar to illustrate his point. I think that this is
a terrible comparison because milk and sugar are physical products of
biological processes while thought and mind are not. I also think that
Searle's attack on grounds of dualism is rather unfair. Even Searle must
agree that there are physical things and non-physical things in the
world (eg Volkswagens and numbers), and that milk and sugar are members
of the first class while thought and mind are members of the second.
Moreover, Searle's position apparently demands that there are features
of thought and mind that are dependent on features of very low-level
biological processes that make thought and mind happen. What evidence is
there that there are such features? I don't see that features of the
neurotransmitters (for example) can have an effect at any level other
than their own, particularly since any one biochemical event is unlikely
to have a large effect (my understanding is that large numbers of
biochemical events must occur in concert for anything to be apparent at
higher levels).
Admittedly there is as little evidence for my position as there is for
Searle's, but I think that there is more evidence against Searle than
there is against me. One last point is my paraphrase of John Haugeland's
comment in "Artificial Intelligence - The Very Idea": that brains are
merely symbol processors is a hypothesis and nothing more - until more
solid proof comes along.
>>Dave
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 86 14:08:41 edt
From: cdx39!jc%rclex.UUCP@harvard.HARVARD.EDU
Subject: Re: Re: Computer Ethics (from Risks Digest)
> To quote one of McLuhan's defocussed analogies: "You must talk to the
> medium, not to the programmer. To talk to the programmer is like
> complaining to the hot-dog vendor about how badly your team is playing."
Whether he was talking about the broadcast or the computer industry, he
got the analogy wrong.
If the subject is broadcasting, the sports analogy to a "programmer"
is the guy that makes the play schedules. True, that person is not
responsible for program content, much less quality. But still, the
analogous position is not the hot-dog vendor.
If the subject is computers, the sports equivalent to a programmer
is the guy that designs the plays, i.e., the coach. He is indeed
responsible for how badly the team/computer plays. True, there may
be others that share the responsibility (like the players and equipment
vendor and the cpu and the I/O devices). But still, in computing,
a programmer bears at least partial responsibility for the computer's
(mis)behaviour.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 86 03:30:03 PDT
From: larry@Jpl-VLSI.ARPA
Subject: "Proper" Study of Science, Conservation of Info
I have to start with materialism. What we mean today when we say the word
may have a common core with its use in previous centuries, but the details
are vastly different. Today we recognize not only wind and wave, steam and
steel as physical realities, but also quanta and field effects (and virtual
particles!)--subjects that pre-modern physicists and engineers would
consider downright mystical. And that would have been exactly true--in
their time. But we can precisely define these things now, quantify them,
experiment with and measure them. An even more radical difference is that
information--pattern, form--is now a part of physics, "a metric as important
as time, space, charge, etc."
The ability to quantify and measure pattern and shape has profound implica-
tions for the study of formerly mystical topics such as intelligence. It
means we can develop conservation laws for information, without which you
can't construct an essential ingredient of mathematics, equations. I'm not
implying I know what they are in any detail; people with other qualifica-
tions than mine must provide that. But the shape of the research seems to
be clear; cybernetics and information theory provide the basis.
For instance, there are several links between information and energy.
Higher frequency radiation has more bits per unit time. Mutation is the
result of external energy pushing genes beyond the ability of their binding
energies to maintain a stable structure. The impressing of information on
media (diskettes, molecules, brains) requires energy which can be measured.
Organization of information in structures (indexed or random files,
percepts, concepts) has time/energy trade-offs for different kinds of
accesses.
In a way, the information content of an entity is more important than its
material content. A decade from now it's likely that none of our bodies
will contain EVEN A SINGLE ATOM now in them. Even bones are fluid in
biological organisms; only when we die does matter cease to flow into and
out of us. We are NOT matter, or even energy, in the Antique sense. We are
patterns, standing waves in four (or more) dimensions.
Maintaining these patterns within safe parameters, or learning new safe
parameters, requires that our very molecules input data, store it, process
it--often in a recursive or self-referential or time-dependent fashion--and
act. (RNA is an excellent model for an advanced computer, for instance.)
And we can be thought as a number of layers each with its unique informa-
tion needs: cells, tissue, organs, organisms, tribes.
One feature common to all intelligences, however rudimentary, is the ability
to create and manipulate analogs of the environment and of themselves.
Simulations are much cheaper and safer than experiments. This also gives a
clue as to how will impresses itself on the universe despite its immaterial
nature--because it isn't truly immaterial. Patterns are no more independent
of their matter/energy base than matter can exist without pattern. (That
is, the pattern of binding is what makes the difference between an atom and
a burst of radiant energy.) Because intelligence is a pattern of energy it
can affect matter and through triggering have effects enormously greater
than the triggering stimulus. A whim and a whistle can destroy a city--with
an avalanche.
The point of all this is that life and intelligence are no longer
supernatural--beyond the reach of formalism and experiment.
What is still a mystery to me is consciousness, but the understanding
doesn't seem beyond practical realization. It seems reasonable that con-
sciousness arises as a result of time-binding, recursion, and self-
reference. Perhaps multiple layers of vulnerability and adaptability are
important, too. (Our current robots and computers don't have any of these
and are thus poor candidates for models of intelligent mechanisms, much less
conscious ones. Thus I'd agree with one recent critic of some AI research.)
I can't agree that consciousness is an improper subject for scientific
study. Our inability to observe it directly (in a public as opposed to
subjective way) is shared by many other scientific fields. In fact the most
crucial subjects in the "hard" sciences must be studied indirectly: radia-
tion, atoms, viruses, etc. The difficulty of defining terms shouldn't be a
deterrent either. All developing research shares the same problem as the
underlying ideas change and solidify.
Some people object on emotional grounds. Many of them only succeed in
revealing their own limitations, not those of the rest of us. They are too
emotionally stunted to have the strength of humility; they must somehow be
above nature, superior. And too intellectually crippled to see the magic
and mystery in star-shine and bird flight, in ogive curve and infinitesimals
and the delicious simplicity of an algorithm.
Larry @ jpl-vlsi.arpa
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End of AIList Digest
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