Re: Strong AI Thesis (No Chinese room, I promise)

Don Geddis endulged us with:

"bob the builder" <brulsmurf@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote on 22 Mar 2006 05:1:
But there are so many neurons and so little (working)DNA.

You need to distinguish between data and architecture. The real world has a
lot of data, and clearly needs a lot of brain memory to hold it.

As a programmer i need to distinguish between data and architecture.
Evolution doesnt seem to respect the same boundaries as we do.
Evolution isnt google.

If you look at a piece of software, you may see a giant RDBMS, along with a
little tiny quicksort algorithm. That doesn't mean the quicksort is not
important merely because it's a small fraction of the size of the RDBMS.

THe analogie between a computer and a brain is taken too far. You can
talk about the foot of a mountain but things go wrong when you try to
find its shoes.

The brain must be (for greater part) a generall learning device. So only a
portion is determent by DNA (a very small, but crucial part). The rest of
the development is ofloaded in its environment.

I'm curious, then, why you think that humans turn out so differently from other
large-brained animals. Great apes, dolphins, whales. Humans can learn
multiple natural languages with hundreds of thousands of words of vocabulary.
If brains are so generic, why can't other animals pick up at least one human
language, say tens of thousands of words? (Forget about speech, which may
depend on the physical throat. What about just understanding?)

I dont really see the big differences between humans and .. lets say
snakes.
Sure i could say, look at me! iam so special because i can write. But
on the other hand iam really bad at catching a mouse. If i would be
trapped in a shed with 1000 mouses i would die within a month. The
snake on the other hand would gain a few pounds.

A two-year-old child has far superior language skills to any adult non-human
animal. Surely the physical structure of the human brain (as encoded by DNA)
is critical.

-- Don

I think its futile to concentrate on things like language. Lets learn
to walk before trying to run. The most interesting things of
intelligence are the things a lot of creatures can do and hence are
regarded not interesting. But when trying to program a robot these
uninterresting things are very hard. Here is were the generall learning
machinery kicks in

.

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