Lambda the Ultimate

Do you think actual reservation is more some kind of stigmergic activity whereas Elephant is more adherent to Platonism which has slowly lost credibility in philosophy at the time as it got a second-life in cognitive sciences and computing?

I did have to follow the link to follow you. But, yeah, basically, that's right, sorta. That's pretty concise, the way you put that! Not sure it would (as a statement) function to lead anyone to what we're talking about but it does sum it up in some way. But maybe, ironically, that's a false 'summing up' that recapitulates the Elephant mistake.... that'd be a kind of simple enough explanation of what would result if we tried to build on your summary.

What's the difference between "theory" and "compression"?

-t

I don't think stigmergy covers the full scope of your objection. The locus classicus for this objection to AI is in Hubert Dreyfus's book.
Be that as it may, I think that regardless of the rhetoric Elephant raises issues about software design that are unrelated to the debates regarding AI.

If you want to know what formal reasoning does to a man, read some Baruch Spinoza and draw your own conclusions.

It's been a long time since I read philosophy, and I am certainly no philosopher, but yeah, I read stuff. I think Spinoza applies here on multiple accounts. In lay-man's term.

He is one of the first to state, in the end, an almost materialistic vision of the world, in which God is seen as the equivalent of an ordering principle, and moreover, the whole world is deterministic. A clock once set in motion ruled by the divine. Except for his vision of God, and the role of man therein, his view closely correspond to that of Denneth who just brings an atheistic view and a lot of current-day empiristic evidence that man are not more than machines.

You need a machine-like vision of the world if you want to ascribe human qualities to machines, or vice-versa, machine-like qualities to man. In the end, the basic assumption is that at a fundamental level there is no difference.

Some of the fundamental questions of AI are not that different from questions asked long ago. It is not that different to ask whether a stone, a tree, a clock, an ant or a computer can be ascribed human qualities. Spinoza certainly had a vision on that, which I like more than Denneth's.

He was also one of the first to formally treat meta-physics, and tried to apply that to, and bring an order to, concepts such as "ethics" or "state", which he exposed in several tractatae.

His latter writings, can be seen as examples as to what will happen when machines will apply formal reasoning to physical or meta-physical concepts. You end up with some very concrete and narrow reasoning. I don't think life is like that. And any machine with sufficient AI, which "thinks" formally, will, I believe, be viewed by people, as essentially, as mad as a hat.

[Note that all of this is not really a comment on the paper, which exposes a more pragmatist, in the Peircian sence, and materialistic view on ascribing human qualities.]

I wonder about your fidelity in cybernetic approaches, Hans? So far I haven't seen anything in this domain that was free from a pre-established context and situation. That's not in any way different from GOFAI ( e.g. Cycs infamous "Kindergarten context" ) except from adding some adaptive capabilities that act as simple rulers that let one reaches a stable state of emergence of e.g. the numbers of node weights in NNs. It is more close to stabilizing temperature of my living room by reinforcing measurement values to the thermostat than the catastrophic activity of creating/destroying contexts, situations and significance.

I wonder about your fidelity in cybernetic approaches,

I think you mean that a Cybernetic approach is no better or different than say a logical or a strong AI approach in "some" sense. I readily agree. The sense in which they are the same is that they both abstract reality into something that it isn't. Let us call that something an artificial language. My point is that such a thing is "as good as it does" in the unforgettable words of Forest Gump. Or was that actually "smart is as smart does". In any case it comes down to utility not abstraction.

Abstraction is a game in which one thing readily becomes something else. It can be useful or destructive. A hammer and a saw can be used to build something or to distroy a perfectly good piece of wood.

I see Cybernetics as a language theory based on the system/state abstraction. In the context of this thread the important fact is that it abstracts observations. It doesn't reduce. It can be transformed and manipulated in many ways but is never any better than the initial abstraction. It is useful as long as it fits the observations but is not equal to the real thing.

The system was formalized in 1963 in the book "Linear Systems Theory" by Zadeh and Desoer. Cybernetics on the other hand is more than a theory. It is a culture, an experience, and a growing archive of useful things including systems based on software.

Also Cybernetics doesn't create unnecessary boundaries, a software artifact can readily be seen as part of its environment. This is part of the problem with strong AI. The AI agenda is strongly software oriented where cybernetics does not draw lines between parts or even say what the parts are made of.