[LINK] Machine Learning Was: Re: Robot cars and the fear gap

[Roger Clarke]

At 12:49 +1000 28/7/16, David Lochrin wrote:
>Hofstatder states "To me, the major question in AI is this: "What in the world is going on to enable you to convert from 100,000,000 retinal dots into one single word 'mother' in one tenth of a second?"  Perception is where it's at!"  

Much as I admire Hofstadter - and I should pull out my copy of 'Metamagical Themas' as well - I 'perceive' no significant difference between the notion of 'perception' as we're discussing it here, and 'grace' in Christian liturgical thought.

It's a denotator of the gap between the physical apparatus and what we think we think.  It's not a denotator of a construct for which one or more working definitions / operationalisations exist that provide a meaningful basis for analysis and debate.

I'm a theist.  I understand why people need a god or gods, and I'm very happy to use the term 'god' for the gap between what I think I can grasp and all those things that I'm sure I can't.  (But she doesn't have a throne, an avuncular look, or a beard).

I put the notions god, grace and perception in the same basket.  

That's not a put-down.  It's an acknowledgement that it's not feasible to construct refutable statements with any of those terms in them, i.e. in Popperian terms, they're part of the ascientific realm.


-- 
Roger Clarke                                 http://www.rogerclarke.com/
			             
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Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law            University of N.S.W.
Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University