Re: Folk Psychology and Social Convention

David Longley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...


> >> >Longley Citation Statistics [8 long years and counting]
> >> >-------------------------------------------------------
> >> >folk psychology [derogatorily] in over 1000 posts
> >> >Quine [glowingly] in over 1800 posts
> >> >silly [regarding others' ideas] over 400 times
> >> >Skinner [in awe] in over 800 posts
> >> >behaviorism [as accepted dogma] in over 500 posts
> >> >[pernicious] mentalism over 100 times
> >> >[pernicious] cognitivism over 250 times
> >> >intensional [as wrongish] over 1600 times
> >> >extensional [as correctish] over 1850 times
> >> >frag.html [self-promotion] over 300 times
> >>

> >It's very clear you are stuck in a loop. Why not learn something new
> >and interesting:
> >
> >http://webvision.med.utah.edu/VisualCortex.html#pathways
> >
> >http://white.stanford.edu/~heeger/psych202/lecture-notes/
> >visual-cortex/visual-cortex.html

> And the reason you think I need to learn about visual neuroscience is? 
> (I thought I'd learned a fair bit of that back at NIMR years ago but 
> hey, what do I know about neuroscience eh?)
> 
> And the relevance of visual functional-neuroanatomy/neuroscience to the 
> *philosophy* of AI is?
> 


The peephole you view your world through is very narrow, Longley.
There are many here who think the following matters are the crux of
building AI's:

How do you recognize what you see? 
How do you know how to move your arm? 
How do you choose which words to say?
How do you understand what they mean? 
How does commonsense reasoning work?
.............

Every such function is known to engage dozens or hundreds of parts of
the brain, each specialized to do various jobs so we cannot expect to
explain them all on the basis of only a few simple laws. We still know
very little about just what each of those separate brain-parts do and
still less about how they cooperate.
 
What is thinking and how does it work? What decides upon your next
state of mind? What determines which ideas you'll think about, and
which processes you'll apply to them? What chooses which decisions
you'll make, and what budgets how much time these will take?

... what sorts of processes do we possess, how might each of those
processes work, and how might all of them be combined, to produce the
constructions that we call our minds?
..............

... suppose you were given the job of constructing an artificial
animal. You could start by making a list of things that your
animal-robot might need to do. It might need to find sources of water
and food. It might need defenses against attacks, and against extremes
of temperature. Then once you have assembled that list, you could
start to instruct your engineers to find separate ways to meet each of
those needs.


Any other questions, Longley?