gjm comments on Taking Occam Seriously - Less Wrong

22 Post author: steven0461 29 May 2009 05:31PM

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Comment author: gjm 30 May 2009 11:40:53PM 3 points [-]

One picky remark: Paul Almond ascribes this argument to Searle, and indeed it appears in a work of Searle's from 1990; but Hilary Putnam published a clearer and more rigorous presentation of it, two years earlier, in his book "Representation and reality".

(Putnam also demolished the rather silly Goedelian argument against artificial intelligence that's commonly attributed to J R Lucas before Lucas even published it. Oh, and he was one of the key players in solving Hilbert's 10th problem. Quite a clever chap.)