From: J. Andrew Rogers (andrew@ceruleansystems.com)
Date: Thu Aug 18 2005 - 17:20:40 MDT
On 8/18/05 12:45 PM, "Richard Loosemore" <rpwl@lightlink.com> wrote:
[...community descriptions elided...]
> Now, some of these communities are more directly hands-on, while some
> just watch and comment and contribute from afar, but the six different
> language that they speak and the six different paradigms they bring to
> the table are all in some way relevant to the task of understanding how
> cognitive systems might work, and how we might go about building an AI.
>
> But the problem is that you can go into one of these communities and
> find very talented people who are completely ignorant of what is going
> on in the others.
Ahem... One thing that is fairly obvious from reading your list of six
communities, is that there are a fair number of people on this list doing
serious research who very arguably do not fall under any of the categories
you invented. That you are not aware of the fact that there is at least a
seventh or eighth community strongly represented on this list suggests that
you may be guilty of the very problem you outline in the last sentence
above.
One thing that you (and others) may be missing is that this list has been
around a long time, and that the ideas from many of the communities you
mention above have been thoroughly vetted and mostly discarded. The list is
pretty quiet these days, ignoring the recent flurry, but there was quite a
bit of merciless discussion and analysis of theory in the early years.
Old-timers are not going to be so keen on re-living old battles.
I daresay that you have at least some gaping holes in your understanding of
the spaces that are considered baseline knowledge on this list for the sake
of constructive argument.
> Could you consider the fact that, even if you *are* a person who is
> fully conversant in all of these, it is not enough for there to be just
> one such person working in isolation ..... that it should be an
> absolutely basic requirement of anyone working in the AI field that they
> can switch comfortably between all of these six paradigms and draw
> meaningful connections between them?
Could you consider the possibility that many of us have taken everything of
value from these six paradigms and discarded the lot of them? All six of
those paradigms (such as they are) are b0rken for various reasons as far as
I'm concerned, and not because I am ignorant of them.
> CONCLUSION
>
> We need a revolution here, folks.
You are a little late to the party. You might want to familiarize yourself
with the theoretical history of this list. There is still a diverse range
of opinion on this list regarding fundamental design theory, but you appear
to have pigeonholed everyone on the list without any idea of where people on
this list actually stand theoretically.
Cheers,
J. Andrew Rogers
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