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/ Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd 78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA Tel: +61 2 6288 6916 http://about.me/roger.clarke mailto:roger.cla...@xamax.com.au http://www.xamax.com.au/ Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law University of N.S.W. Visiting Professor in Computer Science Australian National University _______________________________________________ Link mailing list Link@mailman.anu.edu.au http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
