Re: Artificial Intelligence FWIW

From: David Longley (David_at_longley.demon.co.uk)
Date: 10/14/04 

Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2004 17:31:22 +0100

In article <416e9382.89344941@netnews.att.net>, Lester Zick
<lesterDELzick@worldnet.att.net> writes
>
> Artificial Intelligence FWIW
> ----------
>
>Let's just cut out the middleman here and figure out what the term
>artificial intelligence means or at least how to address the subject
>definitive terms. Now, analogous to the case of free will and abstract
>information and knowledge, we find that artificial intelligence is a
>subspecies of intelligence. So we don't really need to concern
>ourselves with the term artificial until we understand what the term
>intelligence means.
>
>Anyone can do the artifice. Behaviorists have their hammers and
>tongs, a bit primitive perhaps but nonetheless effective for training
>animals. Cognitive scientists have their electrodes, MRI's, and drug
>implants. And ai'er's have their computer models and simulations. So
>artifices aren't really the issue. In fact in the half century or so
>since Turing's formative work and subsequent development of the
>computer and software, the issue of an artifice by means of which to
>implement artificial intelligence has disappeared in any event.
>
>So, if the problem in artificial intelligence or ai is not one of the
>artifice, it has to be one of the intelligence. In other words, the
>whole problem of artificial intelligence seems to boil down to a
>question no one except science fiction writers appear particularly
>anxious to address. And that is what the hell is intelligence?
>
>Regards - Lester

"Intelligence" as used by most people, is just an intensional term which
means whatever they want it to mean so long as nobody asks what they
mean. That's why it's scientifically and technologically useless except
for bewitching the naive and unwary. The way that you, and others in awe
of so-called computer and cognitive "science" ask the questions you do,
and "discuss" the issues that you do, simply shows the extent to which
you're all under the spell of those who both create and exploit our
natural, folk psychological (mentalistic) vernacular for their own,
usually egregious self-interest. 

-- 
David Longley
http://www.longley.demon.co.uk