[From Bill Powers (920915.1200)]
Cliff Joslyn (920915) --
Right on the button, as usual. Your second point, about defining
intelligence, is the most fundamental in my opinion. If I were
constructing an intelligence test, I would make sure that everything I
know know to do well would score high, and the things I've never
mastered would contribute nothing. Intelligence, of course, means
understanding control theory, so Dizzy Gillespie would score low,
allowing me to get even for being a lousy jazz musician.
You'll notice that when I discussed the Turing test, I expressed it as
trying to find out whether the entity at the other end was a human
being or a program.
ยทยทยท
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Eric Harnden (920915.1230) --
A lot of the things I've written about the slipperiness of words,
about trying to see beneath the words to the perceptions that they
mean, were attempts to express what you say so well:
frankly, i don't think it matters where one puts the 'behavior'
label. >my own approach has always been a cybernetic one, and the
shifting of a >label doesn't change any of my (mental or experimental)
model >structures.
The model itself is the perception that matters, isn't it? I've always
claimed that the way to prove you understand control theory is to
explain it to three different people without using any of the same
words for what the system does. When you have a picture of the
_organization_ in your mind, it really doesn't matter how you describe
it.
For convenience, I think it's worthwhile differentiating actions from
consequences, because there are some phenomena relating them that are
interesting. When the controlled consequence is disturbed, assuming
the reference level remains the same, the action HAS to change in just
the way required to counteract the disturbance. It's in that sense
that the disturbance determines the action. But this is very much an
AS IF situation; you can't explain this relationship without grasping
the way the whole loop behaves. The appearance is that the disturbance
causes the action; that's what led to S-R theory.
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Best,
Bill P.