Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 3.
            Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
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    [1]    From: Neven Jovanovic 
           Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.1: cognitive prosthetics, expert systems (25)

    [2]    From: Jim Rovira 
           Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.1: cognitive prosthetics, expert systems (71)


--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Date: 2019-05-07 20:37:58+00:00
        From: Neven Jovanovic 
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.1: cognitive prosthetics, expert systems

Willard,

the quotation by Hutchins reminds me of a famous passage in Plato's
Phaedrus (274b-277a) where Socrates criticizes writing, also "sold" by the
Egyptian daemon Theuth as an amplifier of cognitive abilities:
https://scaife.perseus.org/reader/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0059.tlg012.perseus-
eng2:274-277
-- and, guided by Hutchins, I imagine "a different set of abilities"
especially prominent in Plato's other kind of writing, the "earnest" kind
("the word which is written with intelligence in the mind of the learner")
-- though Plato / Socrates seem to prefer the old ways to any kind of
writing.

Best,

Neven

Neven Jovanovic, Zagreb








--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Date: 2019-05-07 15:35:22+00:00
        From: Jim Rovira 
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.1: cognitive prosthetics, expert systems

I'm beginning to think that comparisons of human and artificial
"intelligence" are misguided from the start, so we should quit using the
word "intelligence" to describe both of them. We are biological entities,
and we have never encountered any form of non-biological mind. We build
machines and imagine that they are like us because we forget that we're not
machines -- we descend into a kind of gnosticism that imagines our brains
exist in some kind of state abstracted from an organic body in an organic
nature. We should begin telling ourselves that even addition and
subtraction are tasks different in a human mind than in a calculator or
computer. I don't think that affect is absent even from how we do math.

I like the quoted text as a way of thinking about human/machine
interaction.

Jim R

This seems to me an excellent formulation of how we might think of
> an artificial intelligence -- and, by implication, intelligence of
> any sort.
>
> Comments?
>
> Yours,
> WM
>
> -----

Dr. James Rovira 
Bright Futures Educational Consulting


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