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AI and cognitive psychology rant (getting more and more OT - tell me if I should shut up)

John J. Lee jjl at pobox.com
Sun Oct 26 13:01:47 EST 2003 
anton at vredegoor.doge.nl (Anton Vredegoor) writes:

> Robin Becker <robin at jessikat.fsnet.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> >What we humans call 'reality' is completely determined by our senses and
> >the instruments we can build. How we interpret the data is powerfully
> >influenced by our social environment and history. As an example the
> >persistence of material objects is alleged by some to be true only for
> >small time scales <10^31 years; humans don't have long enough to learn
> >that.
> 
> Persistence of material objects will become obsolete much sooner. See:
> 
>  http://crnano.org/systems.htm
> 
> This discusses three ethical systems and their usefulness for dealing
> with the coming nanotechnology era.

But this is all quite irrelevant to the question of the validity of
realism.  Robin and Anton both are merely making points about the
particular common-sense *models* of reality that we carry with us in
order to get through the dayy without spilling our coffee or trying to
walk through doors.


> The articles conclusion has quite a Pythonic ring to it, I feel.
> However just like Python, it will have to give up on backward
> compatibility someday :-)

Weak link, very weak, Anton. ;-) Still, at least you're trying, unlike
me...


John
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