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Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 61. Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London Hosted by King's Digital Lab www.dhhumanist.org Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org Date: 2019-05-31 12:04:17+00:00 From: Jim RoviraSubject: Re: [Humanist] 33.57: the poetic structure of scientific thought I think we really know so little about the subject that there’s no difference between empirical science and fiction on this question. Empirical science might someday build a machine that perfectly imitates the neural connections of a human brain, but it can’t tell us if it’s intelligent the same way human beings are intelligent. It may assume it is, but that’s a philosophical presupposition, not a scientific one. The presupposition here is that the “mind” consists of patterns of electrical impulses alone, and if we can replicate the patterns, we can replicate the mind. There’s no empirical support for this belief, however. It’s just as much science fiction (literally) as anything else. I’m not saying ignore any area of inquiry, of course. I’m just saying know our limitations. Jim R Sent from my iPhone > It seems to me that there are rich openings for important work that > obscured by this turning away, e.g. on the subject of AI, probing the > space between technical efforts to build ever better imitations of us > and theorising safely abstracted from the machinery and the sciences > involved in building them. We seem to be awash in notions of what lies > ahead (the revolution so often postponed for technical reasons), some > of it quite seriously scary. Well-written fiction based on these notions > tells us a lot about our dreams and nightmares. But for effective > scholarship we need something else, I think. > > Comments? > > Yours, > WM _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted List posts to: humanist@dhhumanist.org List info and archives at at: http://dhhumanist.org Listmember interface at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted/ Subscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/membership_form.php
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