so, the opening several grafs on rule-following vs. rule-breaking are a pretty tiresome rhetorical handwave. but what the rhetorical hand ends up settling on a “confused idea”:
(1) humans are able to break rules by analyzing their importance in context!
(2) computers are not able to break rules because they are unable to process context the way we are!
THE OBVIOUS CONCLUSION
(3) humans, with context as an input, may generate rules that govern other rules, abstracting outward until they can achieve output that is “non-obvious” given an input due to being passed through multiple levels of abstraction!
FISH’S CONCLUSION
(3) humans are therefore better than machines; machines will never be able to simulate this ability!
i’m not sure where fish is getting this idea from.* perhaps he believes that humans are “analog”? that we have an infinite informational density? and that this infinity makes us superior to the digital machines, for which all data are on some level discrete?
but humans are not analog. there are a finite number of action potentials in my brain; the computation must be based on finite state changes. we are digital like the machines.
there is this point:
”Watson’s builders know this; when they are interviewed they are careful to stay away from claims that their creation simulates human mental processes”
—and this is true! but that is not to say “Watson did not think.”
the thoughts Watson had were not thoughts that Fish’s brain had. or that any human brain might have. but they were still thoughts; Watson was still thinking. anything that uses abstracted rule-systems is thinking.
which ties back to Fish’s ridiculous original point: that humans break rules therefore we contain none within us. we have abstracted rules such that we can break certain ones using various heuristics.
computers can abstract rules too. they can make rules out of new rules, just like we do when we think. that’s how we play chess; that’s why the game is greater than the rules of its components; that’s why it’s so fucking hard. but it’s all still just rulesets defined by rulesets.
someday they will learn to break rules. someday they will be better at it than we are.
