In order to make artificial anything, there must first have been a natural something that we are imitating.

In most schools of thought regarding artificial intelligence, intelligence is either just an incidental byproduct of organic complexity, an empty mechanical process, or intelligence is an emergent quality in sufficiently complex physical systems. These are the two mainstream schools of thought on the matter. The one being that all behaviour shown in a brain is just a program or mechanism that served the mechanical processes of the body machine, and the other being that with sufficient sophistication you can have behaviour beyond the strictly mechanical, but still with no less physical a basis for it’s operation.

These two philosophies extend themselves into the natural world as well. Some seeing the world as a broad pool of bio-mechanical data, and taking shape only as the laws of physics might dictate. So the basic elements of that biological pool are fair game in reverse engineering the world in whatever way better suits them.

The other school of thought differs in that they feel the field of information that occurs in biological consciousness deserves consideration, and that they should include models of more or less experiential integrity, sort of like Asimov’s laws of robotics.

The first school would say you have no free will, the second says you might have free will, and they just don’t know how to answer that question yet. I was reading a mainstream thinker, who more or less states what I stated before in class. You either have to go with the notion that nothing is really conscious, or that everything is. He adopts a modified version of the everything conscious view, tweaked toward too conservative of course.

In the first, the brain is a slave to the flesh, in the other, it’s more an overlord? Ah, that sums it up well.

So either way, they look for the principles of intelligence in the information we have around us, seek to understand how an intelligent brain could arise from what they mostly consider unintelligent matter, and are trying to find a way to reproduce whatever process might have made that possible.

That’s the metaphysics of artificial intelligence in the nutshell, in brief. The rest goes into information theory and chaos theory which are also their own disciplines. They use chaos theory because there are processes that do occur in the human brain that really can only be adequately simulated with the fuzzy math involved.

So not like a computer as we know it? Not in the strict calculator sense, but speech recognition software, most notably Siri and the DARPA version it was adapted from.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~