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My early mentor Thomas O'Dea once remarked in a seminar that he had been convinced he had come up with a good many sociological insights on his own until he began rereading a few sources.
I know I've written about David Gelernter before, if only because of his 1939: The Lost World of the Fair. Since the piece published on the Edge site is the English version of a summary commissioned by a German publication, I've probably read his opinions at the artificiality of artificial intelligence before. (I've probably even made the joke that Yeats would have loved Gelernter, an artificial bird singing to lords and ladies of Byzantium being the mechanical version of Descartes' dog. Gelernter's artificially intelligent machines will be the equivalent of Descartes' animals, simulacra that are behaving without ever having any awareness that they are behaving. I would illustrate this post with E. K. Huckaby's taxidermied dog filled with clockwork, if I could find an image of it online.)
It's intriguing to find (or to find again) that a professor of computer science at Yale is so firmly on the side of embodiment, insisting that when computers simulate intelligence, it will remain a simulation. "An artificially intelligent computer will experience nothing and be aware of nothing. ... Still: it will act as if it did. It will act like an intelligent human being. And then what?"
Gelernter answers a good many of the questions I had been putting to myself in earlier posts about just why "there can be no cognitive spectrum without emotion." (His computer smarts aside, that's one of the reasons they pay him the big bucks. How many other AI specialists quote Rilke en route to discussing the role analogy plays in human consciousness and to his assertion that "No computer will be creative unless it can simulate all the nuances of human emotion.")
Since all of my readers keep up with what's on at Edge, I realize this post is superfluous, but I always like it when one or more of my persistent questions is answered by a major player who basically agrees with me. It doesn't mean that I agree with him in all particulars, of course. But human beings like to belong to communities, especially ones they have gate-crashed with no right to be there or conjured into phantasmal existence out of nothing.
"Dream-Logic, the Internet, and Artificial Thought" can be perused at
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gelernter10.1/gelernter10.1_index.html
I know I've written about David Gelernter before, if only because of his 1939: The Lost World of the Fair. Since the piece published on the Edge site is the English version of a summary commissioned by a German publication, I've probably read his opinions at the artificiality of artificial intelligence before. (I've probably even made the joke that Yeats would have loved Gelernter, an artificial bird singing to lords and ladies of Byzantium being the mechanical version of Descartes' dog. Gelernter's artificially intelligent machines will be the equivalent of Descartes' animals, simulacra that are behaving without ever having any awareness that they are behaving. I would illustrate this post with E. K. Huckaby's taxidermied dog filled with clockwork, if I could find an image of it online.)
It's intriguing to find (or to find again) that a professor of computer science at Yale is so firmly on the side of embodiment, insisting that when computers simulate intelligence, it will remain a simulation. "An artificially intelligent computer will experience nothing and be aware of nothing. ... Still: it will act as if it did. It will act like an intelligent human being. And then what?"
Gelernter answers a good many of the questions I had been putting to myself in earlier posts about just why "there can be no cognitive spectrum without emotion." (His computer smarts aside, that's one of the reasons they pay him the big bucks. How many other AI specialists quote Rilke en route to discussing the role analogy plays in human consciousness and to his assertion that "No computer will be creative unless it can simulate all the nuances of human emotion.")
Since all of my readers keep up with what's on at Edge, I realize this post is superfluous, but I always like it when one or more of my persistent questions is answered by a major player who basically agrees with me. It doesn't mean that I agree with him in all particulars, of course. But human beings like to belong to communities, especially ones they have gate-crashed with no right to be there or conjured into phantasmal existence out of nothing.
"Dream-Logic, the Internet, and Artificial Thought" can be perused at
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gelernter10.1/gelernter10.1_index.html
