Re: Robot Evolution


"John Edser" <edser@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:emc0l6$1p6s$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


"Kent Paul Dolan" xanthian@xxxxxxxx wrote:-


I REPEAT: Machines do not "program" men.

JE:-
PLEASE NOTE: this does NOT mean that men
CANNOT be programmed in some way by
machines.

snip rhetoric<
You directly contradict your quoted
statement that machines do not program men.

snip rhetoric<

JE:-
Dear oh dear ... it appears you are now refusing to differentiate between
"not" and "cannot".

snip pointless repeats<

It is the case that men can program computers to do
thinking of which men are incapable, simply because
a human lifetime is too short to accomplish the
sheer quantity of thinking computers can do in a day,
at modern speeds.

JE:-
All the above means is that the "thinking" was done by the programmer and
NOT the machine. Thinking is inductive/deductive and not just deductive.
Without a single exception, running a computer program is just a just dumb
act of deduction.

Definitions:-
Induction: from the particular to the general.
Deduction: from the general to the particular.

Machines cannot induce a thing because nobody knows how a mind makes an
induction.

No, but we know some particulars concerning "induction" in animals. Indeed,
a great deal is known about it. Please see the entire history of the
experimental analysis of behavior, some of which can be found in the 50
years of the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior. One could
say that not only is the study of operant conditioning the study of
intention, it is also the study of much of what we call induction.



Induction remains such an enormous mystery re: intelligence that
Hume preferred to pretend that it doesn't even exist. Without a workable
theory of induction nobody could possibly write a program to tell a
machine
how to do it...could they...

Computers have become the
accessories to our minds that automobiles are to
our legs: a way to go faster than we otherwise might.

JE:-
Faster deduction does NOT mean faster machine thinking, it only means
faster
applications for people who can think.



But the situation of computers thinking extends well
beyond that. There are well document cases of
computers designing electronic circuits in ways
unthought of by man, of computers discovering
mathematical theorems unthought of by man, and,
in the case of the four color mapping problem, of
computers proving mathematical theorems of which
the human mind is simply incapable of doing the
same due to low memory capacity and slow speed.

JE:-
Thank the programmer and not the machine.

What is lacking now, but being avidly sought, is a
_generalized_ way for computers to assemble
existing information to develop new information, in
the way they already do in the above cases and
many more.

JE:-
Machine cannot make inductions. All they can do is deduce from the
inductions allowable via the program that they run. Until a machine can
make
an induction all on its own it cannot think. The mantra for computers has
never changed: "garbage in garbage out". The human mind remains unique
because it can produce endless non garbage from endless garbage.





Once that is achieved, robots will be
able to evolve without further human assistance.





.