Dear Rich Cooper:
You say:
It isn't necessarily true that a machine is a closed system. The ultimate conversing machine, for example, can acquire and store new experiences with new syntax, concepts, vocabularies, or just verbs, nouns,
adjectives and the like.
Please give my text on predictive computation (for which I provided a link-- http://www.nadin.ws/archives/2466) a bit of your attention. Turing provided early on details on what machines are. The “ultimate conversing” machine you describe
is a goal towards which many work. However, the capabilities you associate with it do not make it an open system (in the sense in which system theory defines open systems).
What caught my attention is your next point:
It would be like saying humans are closed because they are limited to just two eyes, ears, hands, arms, legs, ... and one each head, thorax, backbone, ... and therefore humans are closed systems.
I would rather say that in this case your understanding is of the humans makes your efforts in ontology useless. “Minds exist only in interaction with other minds” (cf. my older book MIND: Anticipation and Chaos,
http://www.nadin.ws/archives/436). Machines are not necessarily dependent upon each other, and even less constitutive of each other. The sensorial in the human being is a continuum (two eyes,
of course, but we “see” not only with our eyes; two ears, but we hear not only with our ears, etc.). The motoric and the cognitive are interdependent…A lot to think about if you care to acknowledge the complexity of the living as opposed to the complicated
nature of things that are not alive.
Thank you for your comments.
Mihai Nadin
www.nadin.ws
www.anteinstitute.org