On Fri, 3 Dec 1999 20:12:47 -0800, Chris Cogan wrote:
[...]
>>My central question, I guess, is what the ability of a machine
>>to play chess (or anything else) has to do with humans being
>>machines. I think it is typically the case that machines do
>>whatever they do better than humans. Isn't this why they were
>>designed and built? An automobile goes faster than a human can
>>run. So humans are cars? The logic escapes me.
>
>The logic, such as it was, was to the effect that, since computers cannot
>recognize faces and humans can, humans must have been designed, or at least
>that the ability of humans to recognize faces was somehow *evidence* of
>design. Yes, of course it's silly, even if we *assume* the fact that
>computers can't recognize faces or play chess or do anything else. But,
>that's the way *most* arguments for non-naturalism are (see my post just
>prior to this one).
This is *not* what I said. Clearly computers are "designed".
I said it "is yet another difference between humans and machines" and it
"is more evidence that the basic AI assumption that humans are just
machines is on the wrong track".
Ssee the intro to my first post on this thread below.
Steve
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On Sat, 27 Nov 1999 23:03:23 +0800, Stephen E. Jones wrote:
>Reflectorites
>
>Here is yet another difference between humans and machines.
>
>We can recognise faces easily, even from acute angles and under adverse
>conditions. But surprisingly computers have great difficulty in even knowing
>that it is a face they are supposed to recognise!
>
>This is more evidence that the basic AI assumption that humans are just
>machines is on the wrong track.
>
>But AI is yet another manifestation of materialist-naturalist philosophy.
>Humans are thought to be machines by materialist-naturalists because
>what else could they be under that philosophy? The Judeo-Christian
>position that humans are "living souls" (Genesis 2:7), ie. a
>material-nonmaterial compound unity, is simply rejected out of hand.
>
>See also Bill Dembski's recent First Things article: "Are We Spiritual
>Machines?": http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9910/articles/dembski.html
>
Steve
================================================
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/faces991117.html
[...]
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"And finally Darwinism itself grew more and more theoretical. The paper
demonstration that such and such a character was or might be adaptive was
regarded by many writers as sufficient proof that it must owe its origin to
Natural Selection. Evolutionary studies became more and more merely
case-books of real or supposed adaptations. Late nineteenth-century
Darwinism came to resemble the early nineteenth-century school elf
Natural Theology. Paley redivivus, one might say, but philosophically
upside down, with Natural Selection instead of a Divine Artificer as the
Deus ex machina. There was little contact of evolutionary speculation with
the concrete facts of cytology and heredity, or with actual
experimentation." (Huxley J., "Evolution: The Modern Synthesis", [1942],
George Allen & Unwin: London, 1945, reprint, p23)
Stephen E. Jones | sejones@iinet.net.au | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
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