🚀 go-pugleaf

> Which brings to mind the question:  if we designed a computer as good as a
> brain, would it also be as bad as a brain?

This reminds me of a colleague of mine back when I briefly worked for an AI
company while I was in graduate school; he maintained that it would be a bad
thing to make an artificially-intelligent computer really work like the
human brain, because it would then also have the shortcomings -- as an
example, he cited some AI systems that were prone to "superstition," i.e.,
incorrectly assuming causality from random events (the post hoc ergo
propter hoc fallacy, that event A caused event B because A occurred
just before B).

> The chemist Kekule several times described his 1857 discovery of the
> structure of benzene as having come to him in a a vision, while gazing at
> a fire. (Benzene is a ring; he "saw" the ancient alchemical symbol of the
> ourobouros, a snake swallowing its tail.) Recently, John Wotiz, a
> chemistry professor at Southern Illinois University, has ridiculed the
> idea that this is the way it happened, claiming that it Kekule derived the
> structure by "hard work" instead of mysical insight.

Actually, Kekule's description would seem to me to be in keeping with
these spatial or "dimensional" models of memory -- thinking of the snake
swallowing its tail might have essentially created a "guess" (in terms of
the image of the ring) sufficiently close to the information he had
collected in his mind on benzene that the guess then gravitated towards
the "correct" structure for benzene in the way the model describes (recall
that it says that if you make a guess sufficiently close to a memorized
item, then the memorized item will draw your guess to it -- furthermore
the models from cognitive psychology say that if you give a person a piece
of information that is related in nonobvious ways to other things they
already know of, they will tend to "discover" the nonobvious relations
eventhough there is no evident, rational reason for their doing so).
-- 
E. Roskos