From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Fri May 04 2001 - 15:39:06 MDT
At 02:30 PM 5/4/2001 -0600, Brent Allsop wrote:
> I wish there was a real money Idea Futures out there, and one
>of these days I'm going to create an idea futures entry on this. I'll
>bet anyone, anything (that I can afford), that by 2025, Steven Lehar
>will be popularly viewed as contributing at least as much to science
>as Einstein. The implications of this theory to our immediate future
>and to what we are is much more profound to us than what Einstein
>theorized about. But for some reason, no one will listen to or read,
>let alone publish and argue for or even against, the profound plain
>and simple logic and rational contained in these works. It is very
>frustrating and unbelievable to me.
I would be willing to bet against you -- I have very strong doubts that
Steven Lehar will ever contribute as much as Einstein did. Without getting
involved in yet another discussion on this, most of this work seems to be
based on some rather slippery assumptions that don't always follow. Every
time I read this stuff my BS meter spikes, largely because the definitions
of poorly defined words appear to change to suit the argument of the
author. If you nail down all the definitions, the reasoning fails.
Perhaps a lot of people *have* read the "profound plain and simple logic
and rational contained" in those works and found it lacking like I have --
you have to at least consider it. For me, the lack of a strong argument
serves to support my default position that it is not material to anything I
need to care about.
No offense, but you push this stuff like a religious person pushing
God(tm). If I don't believe what you are selling me, the product appears
to be a weak argument, therefore the obvious solution (from your
perspective) is for me to suspend reason and experience The Truth(tm) so
that I can believe. While convenient for the person selling, it is an
absurd proposition to a potential new buyer (essentially being nothing more
than a "free" hit on the dealer's crack pipe).
> By the way, are there any AI people out there working on
>representation and reasoning about visual 3D data? I bet if you apply
>some of Steven's models to an AI visual system, you'd fairly easily
>get one mondo powerful system with near as much 3D visual common sense
>awareness and intelligence as we have!
I've read articles about extraordinarily capable non-AI systems that can
hypothesize and model complex 3D spaces from 2D input. The algorithms are
there, so it seems that any generic AI could use the data to great
effect. I don't think awareness and knowledge of 3D spaces has any
intrinsically special nature.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
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