Great Minds think alike, and Fools seldom differ.

Read the Internet long enough, and you'll always find someone who's thinking the same things you are.
Hitting that resonant phrase then makes you feel twice as right about what you were thinking.
Example? Certainly.

After a lifetime of struggling with Artificial Intelligence, gradually being reduced to the point where I would accept a robot with the brainpower of my terrier as amazing (Goodbye, R.Daneel Olivaw. Goodbye, OLGA.), I came to see that one of the sticking points of figuring this whole mess out was too little sensory input from the real world.

Well meaning academics would construct elaborate programs, and then connect them to reality via 1-10 sensors, with a bitrate of a few hundred bytes/sec. (Don't get me started on cameras, and the difficulties of implicit vision.) Even CYC, which I think was an amazing attempt at bootstrapping, is going to go nowhere, because it doesn't have a connection to the real world*. Intelligence works against reality; philosophically speaking, Intelligence is Figure to Reality's Ground**. Or vice versa.

So I was entertained to encounter this article by this blogger:


"...The idea of embodiment always struck me as both stunningly good and rather obvious – or more precisely, the fact that it wasn՚t obvious and needed to be put forward as a radical insurgent movement was kind of alarming. It indicated that there was some kind of culture-level sclerosis going on, a form of brain-damage that I avoided mostly by unplanned deficiencies in my education." --mtraven


Not to mention 'unplanned deficiencies in my education' could almost be a rephrase one of my favorite quotes:

" "Were we all well adjusted, we would ossify and die.The world is kept healthy only by some of the unhealthy minds lurking in it. The first implement made by man was not a scraper or a celt or stone knife.It was a crutch, and it wasn't devised by a hale man...Know you that it is not the fine bulls and wonderful cows who make the new paths. Only a crippled calf makes the new path. In everything that survives there must be an element of the incongruous."  -- 'Eurema's Dam', R. A. Lafferty


*Terminal input asking question like 'WHO IS THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES?' is not going to generate a recognizable intelligence. I don't even know what sort of mind would inhabit a space like that.

**No, I didn't make that phrase up.