Here are a few of my ideas on the subject.
>Think about all the things you know.
>How would you go about giving a computer all this
>information ... expressing everything in terms of symbols
>and rules? How long would it take? Is it the case that
>everything you know you were told and just remembered?
What makes the human brain any different from a computer? We still have
input, only in a different way to a computer. All messages have to be
stored in the brain and this isn't done by images but must be done in
the same terms of symbols and rules. And then all these memories need
to be reached when need. The same process with a computer only we need
to provide it with the symbols and rules and not the image (only having
said that it is now slowly possible with scanners)
>If you were to be told everything you know in the same way
>as a symbolic computer needs to be told, would you have
>been able to know all the millions of things you know by
>the age you are now?
>It seems to me very unlikely that I could have acquired
>the knowledge I have now just by being taught millions of
>rules. What do others think?
I think every thing you learn is subjective to experience, learning
basic principles and then being able to expand on them, for example the
idea that if you learn throughout you life that every-thing with one
leg/stump is a tree, and one day you saw a stork standing on one leg
would you call it a tree?
We don't remember a million things but that doesn't mean that we
haven't learnt them, they're stored in our memory only we don't know
how to recall what we've learnt.
Michelle Smolarek
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