agent at siu.edu (Dustin Voss) writes:
>Any opinions on the below?
>In article <3773cc31.0 at news.victoria.tc.ca>, uj797 at victoria.tc.ca (Arthur
>T. Murray) wrote:
>>http://www.scn.org/~mentifex/aisource.html Mind.Forth Robot PD AI
>>is nearing a 28th major Web release [...]
>>>>Mind.Forth is so near to completion that this interim release has
>>been undertaken as a safety measure, in defiance of any calamity.
>> [...]
Here's a somewhat tragic datapoint on Arthur, saved for posterity despite
the X-no-archive. I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions ...
************
From: uj797 at victoria.tc.ca (Arthur T. Murray)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,comp.ai,bionet.neuroscience,alt.memetics
Subject: Mentifex musings on the comp.ai vote
Date: 27 Apr 99 19:34:14 GMT
Organization: Victoria Telecommunity Network
Message-ID: <37261136.0 at news.victoria.tc.ca>
Summary: Do you expect AI and a theory of mind to come from a normal person or from a Beethovenesque Hagestolz?
Keywords: Dear Dossier, Grauschrift, memes, memetics, Usenet newsgroup moderation, Vaierre WR Wallingford Revier
X-No-Archive: yes
Am 27. April 1999, Dienstag Morgen unweit des Honig Baers. Simpli-
citer dictum, mihi necesse est aliquid novi.
Right now I have three or four big concerns. I suffered a person-
al injury to my body on SUN.18.APR.1999. I am near the center of
a big controversy in comp.ai on the Internet. I need to gain mas-
tery over my food intake and slim down my body. My ESI job has
recently been in a state of crisis. I wish to resolve my social
identity as FRI.31.DEC.1999 approaches.
I went with A(mplexa)nda last Sunday for a walk interrupted by my
tripping on a piece of waxboard and gashing the skin off my left
kneecap. (Nine days later, I still feel vestigial pain from the
not yet fully healed skin.) My knee was covered with bright red
blood, and I was terrified that infection might set in. Luckily,
Hong-Kong-born Anda had a plastic bottle of water with her, which
she poured over the napkins that I used to clean the dirt and
grime off my wound. I have been extremely careful for nine days,
and no infection has set in.
In comp.ai various people are mentioning Arthur T. Murray by name
as one of the posters they are thinking about as they deliberate
whether or not to moderate the newsgroup. They are considering
moderation, while I am considering a complete withdrawal from
posting to Usenet. (Wow, I am so addicted to Internet posting
that I even read back over what I have written thus far and I
imagine whether or not it would make a good Usenet post.)
"Performance art" -- my eye! (That's what one guy said my AI
project amounts to on the Internet.) I should offer some kind of
deal to the comp.ai voters. A plea bargain, as it were. The
trouble is, I don't even know who is in my camp, and who is agin'
me. David G. Mitchell has never apologized for his slings and
arrows of three years ago. On the other hand, Joshua Scholar
seems to say on balance that I am imbalanced but brighter than
average. Matthew L. Ginsberg -- who is always getting written up
in The New York Times along with Dana Nau and David Gelernter --
sets out bait for me in comp.ai and tries to get me to make a
fool of myself. But the man that everyone everywhere admires,
the Anti-Spam himself, Aaron Sloman, has announced his NO vote
and has reminded everybody that artificial intelligence requires
an extremely multidisciplinary approach.
Why can't people in comp.ai see the sincerity of my AI diagrams
and of my lifelong effort to create
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Agora/7256/acm.html public domain
AI? They are like that Chinese-American chick who jumped at the
chance to come and see my Vaierre apartment nine days ago. For
the three years previous to her being ushered in to the world
epicenter of hit-and-run PDAI memes, she was always hugging me
and saying that my father should buy her and me a house here in
Seattle. Once she gets inside the most concentrated thinktank
for parsecs around, she complains about the stacks of newspaper
clippings. I explain that every single newspaper article is
extremely important, and I pull one out at random to show her the
handwriting at the top of the page: "O S A". The letters stump
me at first, but down below I see an article on Official Secrets
Acts -- the legal instrument of terror by which Great Britain
keeps its population subdued. What do women really want, Sigmund?
Here I gashed my knee open trying to walk her home and ever since
then she stares at me like I am some kind of weirdo. VOTE NO!
