http://blather.newdream.net/m/mentalese.html

Might as well hold your breath and wait for the singularity.

"Man is able to do what he is unable to imagine," French poet, Rene Char.

Some day we will know if the singularity can occur or whether it is prevented by physical limits.

Hey Rick,

Do you know anything about recursion and recursive calculation?

Yes indeed. My chess applet (chess.captain.at) uses lots of recursion.

How the mind spins a limited # of terms into an infinite # of often complex statements?

Mentalese - language and mathematics and perhaps other cognition all depend on a deeper quality.

How does a computer manage this?

Anything that a person can teach to another person, a computer can be taught to do. That's because in teaching, the teacher must transfer information to the student, and that requires symbolic representation of the information. If it can by symbolically represented, then it can be translated into a computer language.

Therefore, computers can do art. If art can't be taught, then why do we have art schools?

QUOTE (Trip like I do @ May 17, 06:03 PM)

Computers don't think.

Quote (Rick)

That depends on how you define thinking. If you define it as "what human brains do" then computers don't think. If you define it as "processing information to achieve benefit" then they do think.

"processing information to achieve benefit"

Not at all. I mean that art can be taught. I teach bonsai from time to time. Bonsai is an art form.

See, for example

http://iris.usc.edu/home/iris/rwagner/robonsai.html

....Bonsai Tasks

Bonsai tasks can be considered a special case of the set of gardening tasks. However, the practice of bonsai is also an art form so the focus is on the routine maintenance aspects of bonsai plus those artistic actions that can be adequately defined by rules.
Let's assume that the bonsaist robot will not be asked to create bonsai from raw materials, but will merely do routine maintenance. Maintaining a bonsai includes unwiring (unwrapping stabilizing wire from the branches), pruning, rewiring, and repotting. Repotting is not done very often (every 3 to 5 years, generally) and selecting the right pot requires artistic judgment, so we can restrict the task list to just wiring tasks and pruning tasks....

What were the results? Were they done in an artful manner deemed aesthetically pleasing by human perceptual cognition?

Sounds simply, (not that it is simple to do) like mechanical dictation, where the computer doesn't think, it does, as programmed by the programmer, in this case you. So they are not being creative and they are not creating beautifully artistic bonsai trees but are merely mimicing a directive of issued by what you, as an individual human being, perceive as art.

How do those that you teach evolve out of the process, both human and machine alike, not that they are alike?

Do they become aware?

http://www.usc.edu/users/goldberg/self-portrait.gif

So this is the soul of a computer?

I do admit that the image does capture audience attention.

But, what of the feeling that it invokes, triggers, and releases. Is it common (universal)? Did it choose it's own palette? I do like the trifecta of black, red, and white. Did it choose the composition? What aspects and details did it encapsulate and capture out of a moment in time? Still not a Monet, picasso, Van Gogh, nor even an Allain.

....Artist Claude Horan invited us to go sailing in Kaneohe Bay. Horan is one of the first artists to use a computer in his work....

....to use....

computers don't 'create art', they produce analytically- or statistically-derived patterns. Sometimes people find such patterns 'pretty', and call them 'art'. Other times, people intend the patterns to mimic what has already been called 'art'. The bottom line is that 'art' is a matter of perceptive qualia, therefore a non-perceiving 'artist' (an art-bot) fundamentally lacks the capacity to perceive 'art' in a pattern and therefore cannot properly be called an 'artist'.

Notice how soulless the image reads?

Maybe soullessness is in the eye of the beholder. It does look rather unskilled, however.

mentalese is the language of the future, someday we will transcend the tongue and ear, and achieve a level of communicative power unheard of today. When thoughts can be transferred without the hinderance of language than what we truely feel can be expressed, it will be through the aplication of technologies as of yet untested that these things will come from. ill point you to one study which i find unendingly interesting which took place at duke university (link here::http://dukemednews.org/news/article.php?id=7100) it shows that the human brain could be interfaced with technologies.. even though all that was done there was with a robotic arm, a computer isnt that far in the future, and when that can be done then cellular technologies could be added, thereby, humans could control a device with computing potential that could connect through a celluar portal to the internet, or any network of their chooseing, notebooks/phones/pcs/ all forms of things would become obsolete for this one invention, pure access to the knowledge of humanity.

And people can "jack in" to cyberspace just as in William Gibson's novels.