[Wittrs] Is Homeostasis the Answer? (Re: Variations in the Idea of Consciousness)
- From: "SWM" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 04 Feb 2010 01:30:26 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "iro3isdx" <xznwrjnk-evca@...> wrote:
> --- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "SWM" <SWMirsky@> wrote:
>
>
> > This is very difficult for me to parse ...
>
> Having read your full reply, I'll say that this is probably the worst
> miscommunication ever. In retrospect, I should have realized that
> would happen.
>
> There's no way I can straighten that out, so I won't even try.
>
Yes, I too should have realized this would be a doomed effort.
> I'll make a few meta-comments to give some perspective.
>
> There are problems that a cognitive agent needs to solve. AI methods
> don't solve them. They don't even attempt to solve them. In fact AI
> proponents are blissfully unaware that the problems even exist.
>
> There are other, quite different problems, that AI systems do attempt
> to solve. As best I can tell, those are not problems that any actual
> cognitive agent needs to solve.
>
But the issue that I am addressing and have always been addressing, even when
asking your for explication of your reason for thinking AI is on the wrong
track, is not what cognitive agents do but how they come to be in a world chock
full of apparently inanimate things.
> In my last post, I was trying to present the basic principles with
> which a cognitive agent would address those problems that it needs to
> solve. And, as I should have expected, you have attempted to construe
> it as being about the kind of problems that AI systems actually
> address.
>
> It's pretty much a total miscommunication.
>
> Regards,
> Neil
>
> =========================================
Yes, but the issue at hand is how do we get these kinds of sentient agents,
that is entities with a subjective point of view, entities that experience.
It's not what THEY do but how they come to be that AI, and cognitive science
generally, addresses.
You have said, here and elsewhere, that AI is on the wrong path and that you
have a different, a more promising approach and I asked for more information on
that. That is, I asked you to explain what you once told me on another list,
that the key to understanding how minds come to be (not came to be as in
evolutionarily history!) is in understandinding the homeostasis of living
systems (which, presumably, computers don't have). But that still remains
unexplicated as far as I can see, or at least I have failed to understand your
reasons for thinking homeostasis yields pragmatics yields perception yields
mind. There is some account of the mechanics of what brains do that is still
missing.
At least Dennett has an account, whether one chooses to say it can't work
because it is premised on the abstraction of computational programming or not.
I am trying to understand the alternative you once told me you had in mind when
you criticized Dennett.
But you're probably right. We've gone over this before and never gotten any
further than we now have so perhaps we really are just not understanding each
other. I am willing to consider that I just may be missing your points here, as
you say. Sorry we couldn't make progress on this though.
SWM
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