Discourse failure alert and saved ribs and reputation
Early warning system is detecting an irreconcilable debate emerging, attributable to two things.
Thing One: The compsci in me loves the notion of the "machinery of the brain." Abstraction and representation ? it's what I love most about it. My approach was always been to find the metaphor. So, of course you have your metaphor processing module. How on earth do you encode that? How do you encode that some machines get the metaphor and others don't? West wind ... do you hard code that into a percentage of modules? If so, do you just map it to the word change? If so, it seems you are missing a lot of the power and magic of the metaphor.
But then, let's imagine (and "imagine" is going to be the crux of the biscuit) that you magically capture the essence of metaphor processing and the magic of the metaphor -- actually let's switch to humor (it's a little easier to fathom, to universally understand). It seems that whenever someone captures the essence of humor, that humor ceases to work, (and no, Maxwell, I don't have evidence or proof). Once humor becomes understood, explainable, captured to encode in machines, it is no longer humorous--the humor magic is lost. So, that seems to be a conundrum to me: How do you capture humor without killing it? It seems the machines would freeze a moment in the rapidly changing humor evolution and laugh at a static thing, which is mechanical; not human. Oh, and when machines are laughing at a joke, are they feeling the same things I am when I laugh, or are they just faking it to look human?
Thing Two: Imagination and complexity. I think I attribute several orders of magnitude of complexity to "human" than you do. I think you have a much greater imagination for creating that complexity than I do, (the crux).
I end there, with respectful disagreement. Don't forget the respect module. It has to be earned and given.
Oh, by the way ... I saved you. I almost burnt the ribs in the middle of this composition. I was all prepared. I was going to blame it on you, "It was Chip's fault." But magically, I saved the ribs and you remain as beloved as ever. Oh, but that does bring up one other thing ... It has been pointed out that all this red meat and cooking over open flame along with all my other redneck ways will bring about a premature end. So, do the machines get cancer, heart disease, etc? If not, how can they understand mortality; and without understanding mortality, how can they be humanesque?
