Do computers "try"?

[Nick Thompson]

Frank,

Your mention of a simulation of fire reminds me of the Fire Simulation put on by a rock band in Rhode Island a year or so back which burned more than a hundred people to death.  

How about vaccines as simulations of viruses?  It seems to me the notion of cue is lurking here.... the idea that the same proposed simulation could be a simulation for some purposes and the real thing for others.  

Interesting.  

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Professor of Psychology and Ethology
Clark University
[hidden email]
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/
[hidden email]


----- Original Message -----
From: Frank Wimberly
To: [hidden email]
Sent: 11/9/2004 4:22:43 PM
Subject: Re: [Friam] Do computers "try"?


Nick,

This reminds me of an ongoing argument I used to have with Hans Moravec.   Starting in around 1980 we were both junior faculty members in the newly founded Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.   He is now a very senior faculty member there and I am in Santa Fe.

Anyway, Hans and I used to argue about the limits of artificial intelligence.  I said, among other things, that machines could not be conscious.  Hans said that the Earth was going to be destroyed by an asteroid, the sun going supernova, or some other catastrophe.  He said that the sooner we downloaded our minds into machines and launched them into outer space the better.  I said that you might be able to make a machine that behaved like me to everyone else’s satisfaction but that I would be gone.  Etc., etc.

One of the places that this discussion led was to was my quoting Searles or Dreyfus—I can’t remember which—to the effect that if someone writes a computer program that simulates problem solving or artistic judgment or whatever people say “It thinks!” but if someone writes a program that simulates a fire, no one calls the fire department.  Hans said, “If the fire simulation were detailed enough they might.  If a simulation has enough detail, there’s no difference between it and what it’s simulating.”  That’s the first time I had ever heard that point of view.

Frank

---
Frank C. Wimberly       140 Calle Ojo Feliz       Santa Fe, NM 87505
Research Scientist, Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, University of West Florida
Phone:   [phone] or 505 670-9918 (cell)
[hidden email] or [hidden email]
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20041109/fdcb8216/attachment.htm