From: GBurch1@aol.com
Date: Sat Jul 08 2000 - 18:45:31 MDT
I can't help but think that the nature of consciousness is deeply rooted in
the nature of its interface with its environment, and that work like the Cog
project at MIT ought to bear out this surmise relatively soon. I've always
felt the notion of developing "AI" in a vacuum was fundamentally flawed: The
image I've had of early AI work was that folks expected to make a "mind in a
box" and then hook cameras up to it so it could see the world. That seems
like a foolishly backward way of doing things.
On a personal level (from which this discussion started), it's fascinating to
get to know people and see how the strengths and weaknesses of their
perceptual tools shape their personalities. People (like me) with strong
spatial visualization abilities tend to think IN space, and do things in a
spatially grounded way, while folks with other strong modalities have a very
different orientation: I have a friend who is very musical that seems to
recall the precise words that people say much better than I do, for instance,
where I tend to recall just the sense of what they say in a schematic form.
Greg Burch <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com>
Attorney ::: Vice President, Extropy Institute ::: Wilderness Guide
http://users.aol.com/gburch1 -or- http://members.aol.com/gburch1
ICQ # 61112550
"We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know
enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another
question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species."
-- Desmond Morris
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