Article 6660 of comp.ai.neural-nets:
From: cam@castle.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm)
Subject: Re: Human intelligence vs. Machine intelligence
Message-ID: <26536@castle.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 5 Oct 92 00:55:43 GMT
Article-I.D.: castle.26536
References: <1992Sep23.162606.13811@udel.edu>
Organization: Edinburgh University
Lines: 53
In article wstein@eis.calstate.edu (William K. Stein) writes:
>rob@apache.dtcc.edu (Rob Jarman) writes:
>> I'm looking for information or references on human intelligence vs.
>> machine intelligence for a research paper. Could any of you help?
> Read Penrose's, "The Emporer's New Mind". All the rest is nonesense.
In "The Mind's I" by Hofstadter and Dennet you will find many
interesting essays on this topic, including Turing's famous "Computing
Machinery and Intelligence" paper, one of the first, and still one of
the best, ever written on this topic. You will find a number of papers
written by both experts in artificial intelligence, and serious
critics of aritificla intelligence, in "Mind Design" by John
Haugeland.
Penrose, although a famous physicist, can't be counted as an expert in
this field.
His entertaining and otherwise instructive book unfortunately suffers
from not being very well informed about machine intelligence. He
suggests that current machine intelligence research programmes are
doomed to failure because human cognition depends crucially on the use
of an as yet undiscovered quantum-physical principle that enables the
brain to utilise a kind of intelligently directed collapse of
probability functions to escape the combinatorial explosion of
possibilities involved in problem solving. He offers independent
support for the existence of such an effect by citing some of his own
research work on crystallization, in which he drew the conclusion that
there was no other explanation possible of the observed effects than
some kind of sub-atomic problem solving effect. Given the existence of
such an effect, it was therefore possible that the architecture of the
brain made use of it.
Alas for Penrose, the fate which so often befalls those who argue on
the basis of failure of the imagination struck rather quickly. Not
long after the publication of his book Scientific American published
an article by some scientists with rather more fertile imaginations
than Penrose, who provided an explanation for the crystallisation
observations without requiring any new physical effects. This leaves
Penrose's explanation of human intelligence rather vulnerable to
Occam's razor.
An indication of the status of Penrose's critique of artificial
intelligence is that -- apart from reviews at the time of publication
-- nobody in the field is bothering to refute it, whereas the
criticisms of such people as Searle and Dreyfus (which are covered in
the books I cited) have spawned more books and papers than you could
carry.
--
Chris Malcolm cam@uk.ac.ed.aifh +44 (0)31 650 3085
Department of Artificial Intelligence, Edinburgh University
5 Forrest Hill, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, UK DoD #205
