[computer-go] "What is Thought"

["Bob Myers" <rtm@xxxxxxx>]

A while back Eric Baum's new book "What is Thought" was mentioned on
this list.  I've browsed the book, and thought I would save the other
readers of the list the cost in time and money of buying it and reading
it.

I won't give an overall review of the book here, other than to say I
think both the thinking and the writing are severely muddled.  It feels
like it's a term paper written by the MIT sophomore who had to take a
semester of philosophy as his yearly humanities requirement.

Most computer scientists think that the mind is like a computer program!
Well, my gardener thinks the mind is like a garden, so there.

Anyway, the discussion of go is extremely superficial and
unenlightening. Besides getting basic information wrong, such as who
developed which program, always a bad sign, he offers tautologies such
as "Go masters play remarkably strong Go." He says that we have a
pre-evolved "program" for "causal" analysis. He then jumps to claiming
that humans have a large number of "computational modules.that may very
well be directly coded into the human genome", including topological
concepts like "connected", "surrounding", and "inside". Besides the
problem that these supposed pre-programmed modules have no connection
with "causality", the relationship of which with go he never bothers to
explain anyway, the fundamental point that such topology modules being
wired deep into our DNA, compared to computer programs which have to
calculate the same concepts in a "computationally expensive way",
accounts for human strength at Go is, frankly, absurd. If Baum cannot
come to a more sophisticated understanding of human skill at go and its
relationship to the evolved human brain, he should not write about it.

--
Bob Myers

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