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I'm not convinced that Hofstadter is pursuing computers that think like humans, so much as computers that appear to think like humans. He abstracts certain obse
by jmilloy 13y ago
I'm not convinced that Hofstadter is pursuing computers that think like humans, so much as computers that appear to think like humans. He abstracts certain observable behaviors of the human mind (e.g. analogy), but there's no guarantee that what a brain can observe about itself is what a brain is actually doing. Does it make sense to ignore the underlying behavior of human brains, and instead try to directly emulate a particular abstraction? We can't let our romantic notions of what brains "do" get in the way.
- hharrison 13y agoI agree with your point, but the solution isn't to instead model the underlying biological nuts and bolts (assuming this is what you mean by "underlying behavior of human brains"). Even if those approaches approximated human behavior (which they don't), it wouldn't be all that informative. Just as creating "artificial" intelligence by growing a brain in a petri dish wouldn't be informative either. (Well, it wouldn't be informative as to what the brain's job description is, although we could presumably learn plenty from of other things from the exercise). The better solution is to come up with creative experiments (with human experiments) that can arbitrate between competing implementations. With modern technologies like virtual reality, you can create almost any counterfactual situation and that to decide between theories that make the same predictions "in the real world".