In Which Jung prewrites AtD's epigraph

[Joseph Tracy]

I really don't know what I think about that, certainly nothing conclusive. I am open to the possibility that mind and consciousness are  fairly ubiquitous and simply a dimension of the universe that we have some imprecise terms for like spirit or mind. But the whole phenomena of mental problem solving could be somewhat more pragmatically bio-mechanistic.  I was listening yesterday to Rupert Sheldrake talk about homing pigeons. Scientific experiments seem to have thoroughly dismissed every obvious or suggested mechanism for pigeons to do this:  memory of journey away from home, sight, smell, hearing, magnetism, celestial navigation, the sun.   We just don't know what enables them to find their way home. To me this suggests that there are aspects of biological consciousness we really don't get and that the shaping of non-biological consciousness(AI) is much more difficult than previously imagined. 
 I have at times experienced phenomenal instances of reading a stranger's thoughts, which suggests at least the possibility that thoughts radiate or have non linguistic modes of transmission.  Research in this area have been so muddied by charlatanism and by mockery that most scientists simply avoid it, but Rupert Sheldrake's work is of interest to me. 
It seems to me that AI has been approached too much as a data processing problem without enough attention to the driving force of motivation. It all depends on how you define intelligence. As the chess programs show computers have gotten  very good at doing individual functions of intelligence. They have the advantage of perfect memory and high speed computation, but will a computer ever do anything it is not told to do, ask a question it is not told to ask or solve,  or will it's programmed expressions of intelligence simply mimic the biases, will and presumptions of the programmers?  

Still, as Pynchon's thoughts seem to imply, the real question for humans is when we can manufacture machines to do everything  human's used to do, then what will human's do? I guess fight over who programs the machines and where to get the energy without killing everything.  Always something fun to look forward to.  


On Mar 15, 2012, at 11:26 PM, bandwraith at aol.com wrote:

> But do you imagine that thought is something
> more than a physical process, or just some
> physically embodied process that is way too
> complex and self-referential to program from
> the top down?
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
> To: P-list List <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Thu, Mar 15, 2012 2:25 pm
> Subject: Re: In Which Jung prewrites AtD's epigraph
> 
> 
> I personally think every prediction of AI so far is absurdly premature. The
> premise still seems fundamentally bizarre to me. I just can't imagine self
> generated thought apart from the kind of innate will that comes with being in a
> bodily form with natural desires attributes and limits. The idea that you can
> program curiosity, or desire to formulate and solve a problem into an electronic
> device designed only to process  binary code just seems real iffy.
>