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mdinnerspace

Hmmm.. just because most humans do not reason logically, are not a selected few capable? They hypothesize, changing our perspective. Logical thinking, is it subjective or objective?

Christopher_Parsons
mdinnerspace wrote:

What threshold does a chess program need to break to say it has achieved AI? The search for AI is making big strides. Almost daily we hear of the latest advances. Wondering though... What criteria is used to proclaim: this computer is simulating human behavior?

The only way I see to do that, is to give the program the ability to learn and a choice to follow the directives it is given or not. However, in the end, since machines don't have feelings, or goals that are contradictory to their creator gave them, unless an outside influence becomes involved somehow, which in that case they had an additional creator by default, and they are given a directive to survive and them something tries to destory them, it would appear that they aren't going to do much more than what their environment influences them to do. Unless it can do all of those things, I wouldn't consider it human like. If it is simply preprogrammed to emulate human behavior, without all of those other things involved, its still only an unintelligent machine to me.

HulkBuster62
mdinnerspace wrote:

Hmmm.. just because most humans do not reason logically, are not a selected few capable? They hypothesize, changing our perspective. Logical thinking, is it subjective or objective?

 
It's not quite like that. The vast majority of people are capable of reasoning logically to some degree. The problem is that humans also make a lot of mistakes and have systematic biases many of which have been studied (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases). With some training and practice people can get better at it and sure enough some people are able to improve faster than others. But no one ever becomes mysteriously infallible and anyone serious about the quality of anything they produce will include some sensible QA steps including making their ideas available for criticism by relevantly skilled independent parties.

Whether "logical thinking" is subjective or objective is debatable. I would tend toward saying that it's subjective in so far as thinking in general is subjective. On the other hand, if you meant to ask whether logic itself is subjective or objective then it's agreed by scientists and (the majority of) philosophers that it's objective and something that humans have evolved a (moderate) innate capacity for. More self-conscious awareness of the principles were discovered by ancient philosophers onwards and, in the course of that, methods have been developed to do it more reliably than if untrained. But that's venturing into the philosophy of logic.

The problem with trying to discuss any "philosophy of X" is that you need to develop a certain level of familiarity with X before the discussions can make much sense or have any reasonable assurance that you haven't misunderstood something otherwise transparent to those who are familiar with it. But to develop that familiarity requires that you're willing to (provisionally) accept the principles of X and acquaint yourself with how those principles play out in practice. It's a frustratingly long lead time for the curious layman who was probably hoping for a simple answer to what appears to be a simple question but there really aren't any short cuts.

It actually reminds me of how philosopher Daniel Dennett approaches teaching philosophy of mind. He first gets his students doing some programming so that they have some practical understanding of what programs are and in particular how AI programs work. The effect of taking that approach is that his students are eventually able to immediately recognise how naive the arguments of some otherwise sophisticated philosophers can be when discussing mind and AI. In contrast, very talented philosophy students who haven't done any programming are easily impressed by these convincing sounding naive arguments.

That's worth considering if you want to improve your understanding of the topic. Resources linked to by POWERJOHN earlier would be a great start.

0110001101101000
shahhussainkcl wrote:
The problem with trying to discuss any "philosophy of X" is that you need to develop a certain level of familiarity with X before . . .

Yeah, definitely. It's fun to be curious and think through things, but because intelligent humans have been doing this for 100s (and 1000s) of years, you'll (basically talking to MDS now) probably never move beyond elementary things on your own.

Which is ok, it can be fun to explore ideas on your own. But before you can have even a basic discussion with someone who knows a little, you'll need to put together a small reading list and learn the basics.

I don't have any suggestions for this case, but I've faced this choice before. Provisionally believe whatever suits you. But before you do some work on your own to learn, don't put too much faith in anything.

mdinnerspace

011... to say l probably will never move beyond elementary things on my own, that I need to learn the basics betrays your intent of posting here your personal issues. What kind of user name is that.. unless it is an attempt at deception?

HulkBuster62
mdinnerspace wrote:

011... to say l probably will never move beyond elementary things on my own, that I need to learn the basics betrays your intent of posting here your personal issues. What kind of user name is that.. unless it is an attempt at deception?

 

It's a puzzle. Go to 011's profile and you get his 'full name':

01100011 01101000 01100101 01110011 01110011

Copy-and-paste that into: http://www.binaryhexconverter.com/binary-to-ascii-text-converter
and hit "Convert". The result should make you chuckle.

I don't think 011 means to impugn your intelligence. At least I didn't read it that way. He's essentially paraphrasing what I've said.

Putting together a reading list isn't a bad idea although it's quite easy to put together a fairly lengthy reading list of popular science books and reading them enthusiastically without ever deepening your understanding. It'd seem like your musing sophisticated philosophy but the odds are that you're getting the wrong end of the stick at every other turn.

I'd recommend a more hands-on and structured approach with something like this: https://www.edx.org/course/artificial-intelligence-uc-berkeleyx-cs188-1x which is linked to from here: http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/


HulkBuster62

@MDIS -- A couple of articles I thought you might find interesting:

Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning