From: Michael Wilson (mwdestinystar@yahoo.co.uk)
Date: Wed Oct 26 2005 - 23:36:23 MDT
Ben Goertzel wrote:
>> Amazingly there are a nontrivial number of people who use 'emergence'
>> as a blanket excuse not to bother thinking about what's actually
>> going on.
>
> True, but this number of people does not include many serious complex
> systems researchers. This observation is somewhat parallel to
> Loosemore's comment that there are a lot of people who hold
> narrow-minded GOFAI beliefs about the role of logic in AI.
The key difference being that recognition for the need to understand
and explicitly specify cognitive structure is a variable quantity,
forming a spectrum along which researchers may be (roughly) placed.
The people at the extreme low end of the spectrum are amusingly
hopeless and easy targets but yes, the main point of my post was that
this shouldn't obscure the real issues, or polarise debate to the
point of uselessness. As far as I can tell, Loosemore's objection to
well-founded rational approaches /is/ a one-dimensional caricature
based on the worst of symbolic GOFAI, and he does seems to be dipping
into the 'amusingly hopeless' depths of the 'emergence-reliance'
spectrum.
* Michael Wilson
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