Comment by andrewcooke
15 years ago
just because you only understand one side of an argument doesn't mean everyone else is an idiot.
in some sense this is the same argument as searle's chinese room. that's sufficiently well known and debated that it's fair to say that neither side can be dismissed as simply "missing the point".
Throughout history, there have been many "well known and debated" arguments that have proven to be idiotic. See: the shape of the Earth.
This isn't one of them, though. And I didn't mean to imply that anyone was an idiot.
Instead of critiquing how I said something, or that I said something at all, can you tell me what I am missing? I'm obviously missing something - Norvig is no idiot.
the problem is whether or not there is any way to "ground" meaning. for physics, the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" might suggest that there are simple "meanings" that underly physical "laws".
but there's nothing to say that the same is true for intelligence or language. maybe the brain is nothing more than a particularly flexible "neural net", which statistical methods are modelling quite well. in that case, "intelligence" is not qualitatively different from "a good simulation of intelligence".
the same problem occurs in free will - does it "really" exist? if we're just (mechanical, predictable, although highly complex) machines then it is difficult to imagine how it can. yet the intuition is that there is clearly some meaning to the idea of a "free agent".
these are hard questions. people don't know the answers. instead we look to what daniel dennett calls "intuition pumps" (see his book "elbow room" on the free will problem) - simple parallels that "feel right". from those, we use intuition to argue in one direction or another. but the problem with that approach is that it depends on what you choose as a "hint".
some advance is being made through experiment. imaging of neural activity in the brain, for example, or the recent discovery that people who believe they have free will behave differently to those that don't.
searle's chinese room argument - http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/
unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics - http://www.jstor.org/pss/2321982 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mathematics-explanation/
i can't find the free will behaviour result that was in the news about a week ago. but that's perhaps less related to this anyway.
and i doubt that everyone who thought the earth was flat was idiotic, frankly. just because something is obvious now doesn't mean it was a stupid question, or easy to answer, when first raised.
maybe the brain is nothing more than a particularly flexible "neural net"
now that I found quite funny :)
(yeah, most likely it is just that)