[extropy-chat] Re: Structure of AI (was COMP: DistributedComputing)

[J. Andrew Rogers]

On Nov 21, 2004, at 11:00 AM, scerir wrote:
> Let me point out the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico
> http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vico/ who published (1710)
> a treatise on the ***construction*** of knowledge


Interestingly, Vico distilled some observations into concepts that have 
a close resemblance to some elegant theorems in algorithmic information 
theory, in the same way as Occam's Razor.  Remarkable really, since we 
did not even have anything even close to the mathematics to describe 
such things at the time.  Vico was trying to figure out the theoretical 
relationships between universal machinery centuries before Turing.


> http://www.umass.edu/srri/vonGlasersfeld/onlinePapers/html/117.html
> This "operational" perspective has been developed by
> Silvio Ceccato (1914-1997) and his 'Italian Operational School'
> http://www.oikos.org/vGmemory.htm


I must have mis-stated myself somewhere -- tricky semantics.  Even 
among constructionists and "operational" perspectives, there has been a 
pervasive assumption the computational complexity is a defining factor 
in the expression of intelligence in machinery.  Even when the models 
are not explicitly computation intensive, the expressions of such 
models are assumed to be.

This is really only important if, given some arbitrary model of 
intelligence, one asks why computational complexity is considered a 
defining factor in implementation.  It is a question of perspective, 
and one can gain some interesting insights by asking this question 
which is almost never asked in a conventional context.

j. andrew rogers