HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: rwmurphr@wildcat.ecn.uoknor.edu (Robert W Murphree)
Subject: Re: Consciousness in animals
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1992 04:44:25 GMT
Organization: Engineering Computer Network, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA

I would place consciousness in Chimps but not in rhesus monkeys.  
When shown themselves in a mirror, chimps will notice they are marked
with dye, rhesus do not.  I also think consciousness has something  
to do with sociality , don't ask me why.  chimps are noticibly
more social than rhesus, though maybe its hard to say how objectively.

To give any insect consciousness on the bases of planning seems to
me to be beside the point.  I think "choice" would be a better 
choice of words than consciousness.  If you ask if bees make
decisions, I guess you could say yes.  You could probably make
a case that prokaryotes do to.  Why do you think a bee is 
conscious, other than the fact that articles have been written
on the question of animal minds using bees as an example?
                                                              
I think you should be careful to distinguish between saying an
animal has a "mind" or "perception" instead of consciousness.
 I may be able to show that an organism can perceive and respond 
to some stimulus, does this mean that the organism is conscious?
Hardly, I may alter my body temperature and pulse in sleep but
that does not mean I am conscious even though it is in response
to temperature or sound stimulus.

I think you are on much better ground to discuss the sensory
apparatus of an animal, and the kinds of problems it solves
than to attribute "consciousness"  to it.  Or maybe you are
trying to refer to the ability to "feel" pain?  That would
put it somewhere in the verterates, between fish and mice.
From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: grounding and the entity/environment boundary
Date: 9 Nov 92 00:19:36 GMT
Organization: SPSS Inc.

In article <qk0TTB2w165w@CODEWKS.nacjack.gen.nz> system@CODEWKS.nacjack.gen.nz 
(Wayne McDougall) writes:
>markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>> It's this generalized grounding that isn't diminished when you close your
>> eyes, or sleep, or take a year's sabbatical.  And I'd maintain that this
>> grounding takes years to acquire, and lays the basis for whatever quick 
>> adaptations to changing circumstances we are capable of.
>
>I'd hoped that was exactly the distinction I was making. I think I'm 
>suggesting that it is possible to maintain grounding with low-bandwith 
>communications for those areas in which we (or an AI system) has a 
>generalized grounding. 

I'm not sure I agree; but the question is fortunately empirical.  Someone
needs to stay for a decade or two in a sensory deprivation tank, connected
only to the Internet.  Any volunteers?

>However, this is why closing your eyes for 10 
>years is a problem - your generalized grounding wears out 

Why do you say that?  People who go blind don't forget what colors are
in that time, do they?  And we generally remember quite a bit of our
childhood experiences-- what our houses looked like, what our relatives
were like, etc.  

>(ain't transistors wonderful!). 

No more wonderful than neurons.  I very much suspect that brains forget
things only when they want to.

>How's this for a twist on the Turing Test? A Artificially Intelligent 
>system is something that is worthwhile to talk to.

Cute, but no improvement on the usual TT.  For one thing, it's even more
subjective than usual-- as Marvin Minsky might say, "worthwhile" is a
two-place not a one-place predicate: X is worthwhile *to Y*.  For another,
I know humans who'd fail this test...
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: grounding and the entity/environment boundary
Organization: SPSS Inc.
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1992 22:30:18 GMT

In article <1992Nov10.022939.94607@Cookie.secapl.com> frank@Cookie.secapl.com 
(Frank Adams) writes:
>In article <1992Oct30.195251.9573@spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>>I tend to equate grounding with the folk notion of "knowing what you're
>>talking about."  If I talk about something I haven't directly experienced,
>>like marijuana, I could be accused of "not knowing what I'm talking about";
>>in this case my statements could be meaningful, but ungrounded.
>>
>>I assume grounding is most important to those (like Harnad and George Lakoff)
>>who see meaning as derived from direct real-world experience.  I suppose it
>>wouldn't much interest those who identify "meaning" merely with logical sense
>>or reference, or with the magic of causal properties.  On the other hand, I
>>don't know how these folks would explain the dubiousness of my comments
>>about the taste of marijuana, since there is presumably nothing wrong with
>>my sense, reference, or causal properties.
>
>There are two not-unrelated problems:
>
>(1) There is, in a purely information-theoretic sense, much more information
>in actually tasting marijuana than in anything or everything you have been
>told about it.  So you *can't* have comparable grounding compared to someone
>who has tasted it.
>
>(2) Humans are not so constructed as to be able to take verbal descriptions,
>however complete and accurate, and translate them into the equivalent memory
>structures generated for sensory experiences.  So even if somebody could
>tell you exactly what it tasted like, you couldn't fully understand the
>explanation.  (This *is* a problem with your causal properties; one which
>an AI need not share.)

Right you are; both of these points are good reasons why humans need direct 
experience with things to talk about them meaningfully.

Neither point is explained, so far as I can see, by theories of meaning in
which the world is neatly divided into objects with properties, and words name
classes of objects sharing a set of properties.  The vast amount of data
we take in through the senses is largely irrelevant under this approach:
the only information relevant to the meaning of the word "dog" is the
properties shared by all dogs and those which distinguish dogs from non-dogs.
Nor is there a difference in meaningfulness, under this approach, between 
statements rooted in experience and those based only on "verbal descriptions", 
or even those merely deduced from other statements.

"Causal properties" is a mantra rather than a theory, so I'll leave it alone.
From: burt@aupair.cs.athabascau.ca (Burt Voorhees)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Simulated Brain
Date: 10 Nov 92 03:19:18 GMT
 <BxBBnw.CEK@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu> <1992Nov7.213838.15600@constellation.ecn.u

>In article <BxBBnw.CEK@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu> lcarr@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (l
incoln carr) writes:
>>In article <burt.720913842@aupair.cs.athabascau.ca> burt@aupair.cs.athabascau
.ca (Burt Voorhees) writes:

>>>It is logical only in that it is an identity, and the question of identity
>>>is at the core of the metaphysical foundations of logic.  It's a mistake
>>>to put logic as prior to identity.  Logic is the tool that we use in order
>>>to be precise about our thinking about identity, but it did not create
>>>identity.  Cat's existed, for example, before there was ever a word for
>>>cat.


>>I would argue that you don't know that as surely as you think you do.
>>Certainty is a very nebulous thing.  You perceive the phenomena, not
>>noumena, that you associate with the word "cat" and, because of
>>certain a priori assumptions that human beings make, you assume that
>>it must have existed prior to your perception of it and your
>>assignment of the word "cat" to it.

If I can trust my memories, I knew that cats existed long before I knew
words for them, or for that matter, long before I knew many words at all.
But this diverges from the point I was trying to make which is that 
metaphysics and identity are prior to logic.  Logic is a tool for cutting
the world up into catagories.  We then assign these catagories names and
hope that they match up with some accuracy to the actual world.  But
things have an identity before we have done any logical classification
or analysis.  To see that logic does not give immediate access to identity
we only need to consider that it is static.  The law of contradiction
says that A is not B, so in particular, A cannot change into B because
that would violate contradiction.  But in the world A's do change into
B's all the time.  Some adolescents become adult, seeds grow, and so on.

>Suppose there was a world that was inhabited by only human beings (in all
>their variety) and various types of dogs.  If a cat were suddenly introduced
>to this world, would the humans ...

>a) Recognizing the very distinct differences between the "cat" and themselves
>   and simply refer to the "cat" as a dog?

>or

>b) recognize the distinct differences between the various types
>   of dogs and this new "cat" and be compelled to name the new
>   intruder as a "cat"?


In either case the "cat" would have an identity before the people of
this world got around to assigning it a logical designation.  An excellent
statement of this state of affairs is given on page 1 of G. Spencer-Brown's
book _Laws of Form_

The question of metaphysics is: what _is_ identity, and how can we think
about it?  But the menu is not the meal, it only indicates what the meal
might be.
bv
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
From: christo@psych.toronto.edu (Christopher Green)
Subject: Re: It is AI when...
Organization: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1992 14:31:29 GMT

In article <1992Nov11.074800.16835JPII@tygra.Michigan.COM> dave@tygra.Michigan.COM (David Conrad) writes:
>In article <1992Nov10.204536.16987@psych.toronto.edu> christo@psych.toronto.edu (Christopher Green) writes:
>>In article <Stafford-101192104649@stafford.winona.msus.edu> Stafford@Vax2.Winona.MSUS.EDU (John Stafford) writes:
>>>Complete AI is when a machine produces useful, unsolicited
>>>solutions to unanticipated problems and we cannot discern 
>>>it's methods.
>>
>>So, if after such a machine has produced as useful, unsolicited solution
>>to an unanticipated problem, we tear it apart and figure how what it's
>>method must have been, the formerly intelligent behavior becomes unintelligent
>>(because we can now discern its method)? 
>
>Indeed, since we are constantly trying to "tear apart" the brain and figure
>out how it works, will we one day decide that our own behaviour is not
>intelligent (once we can discern its method)?
>
I take the to be a reductio on the original proposition, n'est pas?


-- 
Christopher D. Green                christo@psych.toronto.edu
Psychology Department               cgreen@lake.scar.utoronto.ca
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A1
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: grounding and the entity/environment boundary
From: system@CODEWKS.nacjack.gen.nz (Wayne McDougall)
Date: Fri, 06 Nov 92 10:27:37 NZST
Organization: The Code Works Limited, PO Box 10 155, Auckland, New Zealand

markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:

> I mostly agree with your comments, but there's a distinction I'm
> not sure you're making.  You are seeing, quite rightly, that you have to
> experience a given event (the supernova, your vacation, a new TV show,
> whatever) to be grounded in it.  But there's also the grounding in the
> world in general that you acquire while growing up: experience with
> cats, cherries, trees, cities, people.  All of this came from experiencing
> events, of course; but what's important here is that it's transferrable.
> Your experience with your grandma's cats generalizes to a knowledge of
> cats in general; if you've seen a meteor shower before you're not entirely
> ungrounded even with respect to the one you missed when your eyes were closed
> 
> It's this generalized grounding that isn't diminished when you close your
> eyes, or sleep, or take a year's sabbatical.  And I'd maintain that this
> grounding takes years to acquire, and lays the basis for whatever quick 
> adaptations to changing circumstances we are capable of.

I'd hoped that was exactly the distinction I was making. I think I'm 
suggesting that it is possible to maintain grounding with low-bandwith 
communications for those areas in which we (or an AI system) has a 
generalized grounding. However, this is why closing your eyes for 10 
years is a problem - your generalized grounding wears out (ain't 
transistors wonderful!). Also you are at a loss for specific events 
that many people will assume you are grounded in - eg. whether Clinton 
is President. Of course I have lots of friends who appear to be in a 
permament state of semi-ungroundedness, or two years out of sync in 
their groundedness. Like absent minded professors, an AI system can be 
forgiven for not knowing the results of the Superbowl if it is worth 
talking to about something else.

How's this for a twist on the Turing Test? A Artificially Intelligent 
system is something that is worthwhile to talk to.


-- 
  Wayne McDougall, BCNU
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Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: grounding and the entity/environment boundary
Organization: SPSS Inc.
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1992 19:49:48 GMT

In article <1992Nov11.230802.132235@Cookie.secapl.com> frank@Cookie.secapl.com 
(Frank Adams) writes:
>In article <1992Nov10.232454.14032@spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>>First, how much is enough?  The amount required obviously depends on the
>>design of your algorithm.  Do you have a design in hand, so you can be sure
>>how much memory is needed?
>
>We can estimate the AI's rate of sensory input, allow a factor of 10 for
>memories of thoughts, and provide enough for 1,000 years.  Will this do?

OK, let's start with a million bytes a second of sensory input.  Pitifully
small, really, but I suppose we could live with it.  You don't say whether 
to multiply or divide by the factor of 10; I'll divide, just to be safe.  
For 1000 years this comes to about 2,900,000,000,000,000 bytes.  Uh, was 
this supposed to run under DOS?

>>Second, how do you know you won't be deleting memories?  I think you could
>>only say this if you know that you either won't be adding to the AI's memory
>>once it's running, or only in tiny amounts.  In either case the AI's 
>>intelligence will be rather limited, as it would be incapable of substantial
>>learning.
>
>Huh?  You seem to be assuming "amount of memory provided" = "amount of
>material actually stored in memory".  There is such a thing as "unused
>memory".

No; I'm assuming that the amount of information received by the senses
over time exceeds the amount of memory available.

>>Third, you are still assuming that deleting memories is a fault rather than
>>an advantage.
>
>Insofar as memories are pro-active, intruding themselves on the thought
>process, a mechanism to weaken them is required.  Such weakening need not
>extend to eliminating them entirely.  Deleting a memory, when in fact you
>wind up looking for it later, is clearly a fault.

Not if it reduces the amount of memories, and thus the costs of housing
and accessing them.

>>Check out the chapter on shrews from Konrad Lorenz's _King Solomon's Ring_.
>>Shrews apparently memorize every physical detail of their habitat.  Exploring
>>new terrain, they go slowly, building their mental map as it were.  When
>>they reach places they know they zip along like dervishes, following their
>>memorized knowledge.  Indeed, they are more apt to believe their memory than
>>their senses: they have been known to jump into pools that are no longer
>>there...
>
>So the shrews use an inferior algorithm.  This is an argument for using a
>better algorithm, not for throwing out the memories.

Throwing out old memories *is* a better algorithm.

But don't let me hinder the march of science.  Go write your algorithm,
implementing a fully grounded AI system, using no more than (say) ten times
the amount of memory readily available today, which never deletes a memory
and whose performance never suffers because of it, over a lifetime greater
than a human's.  When you've done this I'll gladly concede your point. 
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
From: christo@psych.toronto.edu (Christopher Green)
Subject: Re: It is AI when...
Organization: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1992 20:45:36 GMT

In article <Stafford-101192104649@stafford.winona.msus.edu> Stafford@Vax2.Winona.MSUS.EDU (John Stafford) writes:
>Another foolish attempt -
>
>Complete AI is when a machine produces useful, unsolicited
>solutions to unanticipated problems and we cannot discern 
>it's methods.

So, if after such a machine has produced as useful, unsolicited solution
to an unanticipated problem, we tear it apart and figure how what it's
method must have been, the formerly intelligent behavior becomes unintelligent
(because we can now discern its method)? 


-- 
Christopher D. Green                christo@psych.toronto.edu
Psychology Department               cgreen@lake.scar.utoronto.ca
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A1
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
From: frank@Cookie.secapl.com (Frank Adams)
Subject: Re: Human intelligence vs. Machine intelligence
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1992 02:50:40 GMT
Organization: Security APL, Inc.

In article <1992Nov1.144220.21708@oracorp.com> daryl@oracorp.com (Daryl McCullough) writes:
>frank@Cookie.secapl.com (Frank Adams) writes:
>>>`Diagonalizing `Diagonalizing this sentence produces a string of words
>>>that will never be believed by David Chalmers.' produces a string of words
>>>that will never be believed by David Chalmers.'
>>>
>>>Now what exactly does G say?
>>
>>You can't talk about what G *says* if you are only considering it as a
>>string of words.  You are explicitly talking about what it as a statement,
>>about it what it refers to, when you do this.
>
>G is a string of words which we *interpret* as a statement. The
>question is, how do we interpret G? Its meaning is pretty clear,
>it seems to me.

The quotation from the original article, which Daryl has now deleted, said
"let's get away from talk about statements".  But he apparently can't make
his argument work without talking about statements.

And as a statement, G is self-referential in an unacceptable way.  Consider
sentence H:

`Diagonalizing `Diagonalizing this sentence produces a string of words which
is false when interpreted as a statement.' produces a string of words which
is false when interpreted as a statement.'

If we can interpret G as a statement, we can interpret H likewise; but this
produces a flat-out contradiction.  Thus it is *not* legitimate to interpret
G as a statement, however clear its meaning may seem.
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
From: mcdermot@cs.uiuc.edu (Timothy McDermott)
Subject: Re: A linguistical reformulation of the problem of consciousness
Organization: University of Illinois, Dept. of Comp. Sci., Urbana, IL
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1992 20:53:20 GMT

In <1992Nov10.173956.20795@meteor.wisc.edu> tobis@meteor.wisc.edu (Michael Tobis) writes:

>In article <iordonez.721351866@academ01> iordonez@academ01.mty.itesm.mx (Ivan Ordonez-Reinoso) writes:
>>Everything in the Universe is in third person (that, it, there, etc).
>>Everything but a very little part, that is in the first person, I. What
>>makes the difference? What makes a part of the universe become a first
>>person? Explain it in terms of third persons alone.
>>
>>In other words, Why am I?

>An interesting way of phrasing the question. I would object to the "very
>little part" part, though. Thus far, the worlds of the subjective and the
>objective have proved stubbornly incommensurable: my existential reality
>cannot be measured by mass or volume. I would substitute "the most interesting
>part" for "a very little part".


There is a middle position surely in which "I" doesn't forget those
second persons called "you",  and perhaps even those third persons 
that are not that or it or there but "they"?

Or is it considered that consciousness also divides 'I' off from
'you' and 'they'?

C
>mt
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: The Paradox of the Unexpected Hanging
From: system@CODEWKS.nacjack.gen.nz (Wayne McDougall)
Date: Fri, 06 Nov 92 10:37:45 NZST
Organization: The Code Works Limited, PO Box 10 155, Auckland, New Zealand

daryl@oracorp.com (Daryl McCullough) writes:

> The statement "You will be executed today, but you will not be able to
> figure out that you will be executed today" is *not*
> self-contradictory. Suppose the prisoner thinks the judge might be
> lying, then he can't figure out anything from what the judge says.
> Therefore the judge's second statement "...you will not be able to
> figure out that you will be executed today" will turn out to be true.
> If in addition, the judge *does* hang the prisoner, then the first
> statement "You will be executed today" will turn out to be true. If
> everything the judge says turns out to be true, then it can't be
> self-contradictory.

I don't see how this can work. If the prisoner thinks the judge might 
be lying in the first part, he might conclude that the judge is lying 
about the second part also, that is that he can figure out whether he 
will be executed today. Its easy if he assumes the whole sentence is a 
lie; he can figure out that we won't be executed today, obviously. But 
that is an unreasonable assumption outside these little problems (which 
are often prefaced with X always tells the truth, or Y always lies). 
Surely a "judge" is shorthand for "someone reliable who we can expect 
to always tell the turth in artificial problems".

Surely, to say in real life, some things are lying, means all bets are 
off. Does the sun come up every day, or does reality (or my senes) lie 
to me on occasion [ nasty trick to play an AI system - play a video 
tape of a sunrise at 2am at the equator - now is it going to assume 
there is some sort of exception to its existing observations (its 
normally a camera, not a video player connected), or is it goiung to 
think someone is lying to it [cf trick]]

How can you run logic in a system where some statements are false, and 
you are not allowed to collect sufficient information to eliminate 
false statements (contrasted with unproveable ones).

-- 
  Wayne McDougall, BCNU
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From: rudis+@cs.cmu.edu (Rujith S DeSilva)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: It is AI when...
Date: 12 Nov 92 23:37:34 GMT
Article-I.D.: cs.BxMMyp.7pE.1
Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon

In article <1992Nov12.202205.23462@cs.ucf.edu> clarke@acme.ucf.edu (Thomas
Clarke) writes:
>If you can discern how it works it's not truly intelligent behavior.  You'll
>know its truly intelligent when you can't figure out how it works.

Why so?  You seem to be ascribing a sort of mystical attribute to
intelligence.  Could you give the reasons why intelligence cannot be
understood, and its workings discerned?

As I'm costing the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars with this posting,
let me use it to advance the definition of intelligence used by (and I believe
originated by) a former advisor of mine, Allen Newell.  Loosely paraphrased:

        A system is intelligent to the extent it chooses actions to attain
        its goals using all the knowledge it has available.

A common objection to this definition is that `But it would make a thermostat
intelligent!'  I believe that the correct response is `Yes, a thermostat is
intelligent, in its own little limited sense.  Given only the current
temperature as input, nobody and nothing could do a better job of maintaining
the current temperature.'

The definition becomes more interesting when you apply to a more complex
system, such as a man trying to buy some pasta in a super-market, given his
wife's preferences, the availability of coupons on some brands, and his wish
to get home before it starts raining.

Rujith de Silva.
Carnegie Mellon.
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy