X-Message-Number: 4047 Date: Sun, 19 Mar 1995 20:17:24 -0800 From: John K Clark <> Subject: SCI.CRYONICS Hofstadter -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In #4044 on Sun, 19 Mar Bruce Zimov <> Wrote: >Since GEB was written in 1979, it predated the work of >Rumelhart and McClelland in PDP which explained alot of what >Hofstadter, coming from the traditional Minsky/Papert AI >perspective, was overtaxing the concept of 'symbol' to do. You've badly misjudged Hofstadter. Fist of all, he's one on the leading critics of the traditional "expert system" approach to AI, maintaining that it's too rigid and fragile to work, except in very narrowly defined fields, and second I've never heard him say anything about Rumelhart and McClelland's work that was not full of praise. >The last 10 years of connectionist research in vision and >other areas stands as a convincing argument that Hofstadter's >symbols are a historical curiosity at this point. For the last 10 years Hofstadter has been writing experimental programs ( Jumbo, Numbo, Copycat ) that employ a philosophy similar to that of Rumelhart and McClelland, they call it subsymbols, Hofstadter calls it active symbols, but both are highly distributed and use vectors in multidimensional space that are not fixed and so can change position as needed. If the two concepts are not identical they are certainly first cousins. >It is interesting that in the quotes above, Hofstadter >regards consciousness as 'liftable' but not to any abstract >nonphysical level. Well I should hope not!!! If Hofstadter started talking about religious garbage I wouldn't waste my time with him. >No matter who is correct on the symbolic/ sub-symbolic issue >for intelligence, one can see that the 'liftability' of >consciousness is a separate issue I agree completely. Exactly how the brain uses symbols is a fascinating philosophical problem, but not terribly relevant when discussing the possibility of uploading. The brain has some PHYSICAL mechanism for dealing with symbols and whatever it is it can be duplicated. We don't even need to figure out what it is to do an upload, just blindly copy from nature. John K Clark -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.i iQCzAgUBL2z5uH03wfSpid95AQGLqwTuMrrmzubjygfqZ26ovjPlVsmC2dlmKtAq 9/YxZJe7do70Eq53SLsFJjiP1sQ7iFo3HTp+pK7y+BnjM0V/nol+Nerk51dQVccb nbWe2p0FAsGNvhmVD/50kqBkxFiFm44tMbsfW87ZPCQ27dg+b10CtOq8lf6L8eSe zhVSlOkE/0ZEe5T+5fODfruIEm+BdeX2kYvl5eQCpbuCM06K96E= =F2sK -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=4047