From: heitkoet@lusty.informatik.uni-dortmund.de (Joerg Heitkoetter)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Minsky, God, and the Muppet Institute of Technology
Date: 31 Dec 1992 15:10:05 GMT
Organization: CS Department, Dortmund University, Germany
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: lusty.informatik.uni-dortmund.de

NOTE: You will read the following through an ASCII filter, that
means the passages where I cannot stop grinning, may not come over
in the same way as I feel about my writing. Moreover I am not
a natively English speaking person, and thus some of my formualtions
may be caused by Germanisms. But I guess that the messages comes
thru to you LOUD and CLEAR ;-)

			"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the
			unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm
			of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow
			sun.
			Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-
			eight million miles is an utterly insignificant
			little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life
			forms are so amazingly primitive that they
			still think symbolic AI is a pretty neat idea ..."
	                -- Adapted from: Douglas Adams,
			"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

In article <1992Dec30.170833.10407@cs.ucla.edu>, colby@oahu.cs.ucla.edu
(Kenneth Colby) writes:
|> What did Hillis, Minsky, Koch, and Lanier have to say contra
|> Weizenbaum?
Hmmm, the contradiction of this gang of 4, against Joseph were of an
artificial (what else?) nature: Gero von Boehm never let the spectator
a shadow of a doubt that he doesn't like them, eg. their work and ideas.

But he loves Weizenbaum, and thus contrasted the first 4 interviews
with a final one with Joseph, and called him "the only post in the
cold flesh of AI." (Germans tend to be romantic, poetic warriors...)

Repeatedly he commented the pictures of "Panspermia", "Minsky's
robots", ("Millions of $ but dump as a cockroach"), and VR show
 with questions like: "...but do we really *need* this?",
"have we gone thus far?", "why do they ignore 2000 year of philosophy?",
"don't we have better things to do, on this planet?"

Most shocking to Gero was abviously his meeting with Minsky in his
Boston villa, the pictures shown really looked like "Bate's Motel" in
Hitchcock's seminal movie.

More interesting to me was that Minsky obviously knew that each answer
caused von Boehm real pains and he played with him, like a cat does
with a mouse -- speculating wildly about the death and everything.
(He wants to dump his "self" (merely consisting of the information
stored in his brain) which would be only the very little part
of you, Marvin! ...as has been stated before in this thread)

Biologically speaking: Minsky has already copied his self, for there
is Margaret and Henry Minsky. AND both of them know more stuff
than their daddy: if you finger on their addresses you'll find
that Marvin has "No plan." while his offspring has better knowledge
of the UN*X operating system they're working on.
(BTW The term "No plan." (Kein Plan) has a fascinating semantic
property in it's colloquial German meaning: look it up!)

The first question to Koch was, which music he likes to hear, while
working in his shed. The answer: Wagner's Ring (Wow! What a cliche!).
Naturally, the title music of the whole special was...you may guess it.

A bit later you could see Cristof crawl on the floor, with his
collaborators hunting a little robot (this scene reminds me to the one in
STAR WARS I, when the Wookie frightens the little black robot, while
on his way to jail ;-).

As I said, again from a NON scientist's point of view:

  Idiot, n.:
        A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human
        affairs has always been dominant and controlling.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Could you think of a more precise definition of "Scientist"?


Happy GNU year, folks!

	-joke

--
Joerg Heitkoetter			|
Systems Analysis Group			| Boy, n.:
University of Dortmund, Germany		|      A noise with dirt on it.
(joke@ls11.informatik.uni-dortmund.de).	|