onegoodmove

I just began reading Andy Clark's delightful book Being There Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again

"Well, what do you think you understand with? With your head? Bah!" -- Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
"Ninety percent of life is just being there." -- Woody Allen

The introduction does a great job of defining what the book is about. The mind is more than, as Andy puts it "a combination logic machine filing cabinet." It is first "an organ for controlling the biological body." We must make decision quickly before the predators get us a difficult proposition if all mind consists of is a "a disembodied logical reasoning device" There are and have been attempts like CYC (short for "encyclopedia") which attempts to create a knowledge base that includes a significant fraction of general knowledge. Creating a system that can reason from inference. Andy argues that this approach will never be more than a useful expert system. One of the problems with this type of system is "the lack of coupling between the system and real world problems of action and sensing."
He offers an interesting analogy between a coakroach and an automobile with similar capablilites. "Such a car would be able to sense approaching vehicles, but ignore those moving in normal ways. If it deteted an impending collision i would automatically initiate evasive action taking in account the road surface, orientation." In order to avoid other dangers created by the evasive action. You can see the problems with the logic machine filing cabinet approach to artifical intelligence. A coakroach, it seems is way ahead of any efforts so far, and nicely demonstrates why that is.

Well, as they say I've only just begun and whether you are interested or not if you check in from time to time you'll probably hear more.

Update: Just noticed David Weinberger had some comments on Andy Clark's "Being There" in his archives and discusses the CYC again here