🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3185@uceng.UC.EDU> dmocsny@uceng.UC.EDU (daniel mocsny) writes:
>One fringe benefit of being largely ignorant of both metaphysics and
>AI is being blissfully unaware of all the ways I am not supposed to
>think. Exercising this freedom tonight I had the idea (probably not
>original) that an anology may exist between the questions: "Can
>machines think?" and "Are viruses alive?"

I rather the like the quote attributed to Dijkstra (can anyone
provide a hard citation for this?): "The question of whether a
machine can think is like the question of whether a submarine can
swim".

>So perhaps a useful way to view symbol processing systems is not as
>"thinking systems", but rather, "mind viruses".  (My apologies to Dr.
>Rapaport if he has already published a series of papers exploring this
>very notion!) :-)

Richard Dawkins has.  His word for it was "meme", a conflation (I take 
it) of "memory" and "gene".

-David West        dhw@iti.org