August 08, 2003

Waste of Perfectly Good Oxygen

Norman Geras points out a question to and answer by Jaques Derrida. To sum up, Derrida believes that merely calling the date "September 11", rather than "le 11 septembre", suggests that "something" happened which "we perhaps have no concept and no meaning available to us to name in any other way" except "international terrorism" which is of course a completely socially constructed concept, and the event is "like an intuition without concept".

To sum up the summary, only an "intellectual" could believe something this stupid.

Posted by Jeff at August 8, 2003 01:24 AM | Link Cosmos
Comments

The venerable "Turing test" for artificial intelligence has an observer converse through terminals with two entities, one of which is human and one of which is a computer. If the observer can't tell which is which, the computer is adjudged to have exhibited intelligence.

I am of the opinion that the Turing test would yield indeterminate results, regardless of what computer or software were hooked to one terminal... if the other terminal were hooked to Jacques Derrida.

Posted by: Francis W. Porretto on August 8, 2003 03:28 PM
Post a comment