So much froth

Your unfounded beliefs are the reason why my unfounded opinions seem jaundiced.

If you don’t have unpallatable ideas, what does that say about you?

Self reliance is not synonymous with Fascism.

The purpose of speech is to cause increased activity in certain conceptually specific regions of the listener’s brain. Does this imply that the command is the basic logical form of natural langauge?

Swords are more frightening than Atomic bombs. Atomic bombs show evidence that some people are unwilling to fight in person. Swords show the reverse and thus point to the brutality in the human psyche.

Self preservation is an organic thing that keeps our bodies in good working order. At the same time it gives us the sensation of self. After all, what would be a more efficient mechanism for a chunk of protein to preserve homeostasis?

Whilst I am compelled by my biology to think in terms of pretty and ugly, that does not mean that I wish to be thought of as Arty.

Whatever it is that humans do when they understand something, it is certainly not what computers do…

Such feelings are motivated by the simplicity of AI systems. We would hate to find out that we were so transparent and mechanical. Many researchers either avoid thinking about the prospect or deny it flatly. One could say that people such as Searle and Penrose deny it first and then base a thesis on the denial.

People have treated each other as if they were mindless beasts whilst declaring the beauty of life, existence and freedom. A good dose of self understanding might be the antidote to such hypocrisy. I don’t mean that [Winograd] is guilty of this but I do think that there is a parallel in the widespread kneejerk reaction to behaviourism.

It is obvious that there are some strict limits to human behaviour. Far from being a cage which blights our existence, this psychological determinism enables us to communicate and interpret the communications of others. It frees us from the shackles of randomness. If there are such rules to our behaviour, is it a good thing to pretend that they are not there, or that they cannot be found and should not be thought about?

Most artificial Natural Language Systems model understanding in apparently complex knowledge domains in simple ways. Our expectancy of the domain complexity leads us to assume that complex understanding must be taking place.

Likewise, ants behave in complex ways because of their complex environment. They are simple creatures. Perhaps the same is true of us, only compounded by the added complexity of our memories. Our context gets increasingly complex and so do we.

Just because laws are stated in computer programs does not make them true or powerful.

AI has been long on practice and short on theory.

The “children of the sixties” are solipsists, and would seek to drag us into the abiss of ontological relativism.

Information is not “what is informative”, it is a constant quantity in the universe. Information is the universe’s structure.

Information can not therefore increase or decrease because the structure of the universe cannot increase or decrease, it can only change. Could some physicists out there tell me if I’m wrong, because I still don’t ken the difference between matter and energy (or the similarity.)

C. Shannon was only dealing with channels, not making epistemological statements. Therefore we should not allow the utility of his ideas to lead us on a downward spiral into solipsism.

Cybernetics, information theory, chaos theory and complexity theory are all based on the same fundamental ideas. Chaos is a state in which the Shannonesque information content is large. That is – the number of possible states into which a causal chain could lead a system are larger than on a system in which the structure is less complex. In a chaotic system - control of the system, and feedback from the system, have a richer structure, and are thus less predictable.

Any study of information theory, and related disciplines, is bound to be cross-disciplinary.

The consciousness that we attribute to ourselves, is a product of our tendency to attribute it to others. Have you, gentle reader, been able to successfully point to some aspect of your subjective life that is definitely conscious? If so could you mail me and describe it to me, because I can’t seem to pin one down, and I wonder if there is a such a thing. Perhaps we are looking for such a feeling because we seem to see it in others. We wonder where it is in ourselves. Is it really so slippery? Can we prove that it is slippery with strange loops

The AI context of autocatlysis is autocatalysis.