[MD] Intellectual Level

[david buchanan]

Wikipedia to the rescue....

Hubert Dreyfus has been a critic of artificial intelligence research since the 1960s. In a series of papers and books, including Alchemy and AI (1965), What Computers Can't Do (1972, 1979, 1991) and Mind over Machine (1986), he presented a caustic assessment of AI's progress and a careful critique of the philosophical foundations of the field.

Dreyfus argued that human intelligence and expertise depend primarily on unconscious instincts rather than conscious symbolic manipulation, and that these unconscious skills could never be captured in formal rules. His critique was based on the insights of modern continental philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, and was directed at the first wave of AI research which used high level formal symbols to represent reality and tried to reduce intelligence to symbol manipulation.  ... Dreyfus argued that philosophy, especially 20th century philosophy, had discovered serious problems with this information processing viewpoint. The mind, according to modern philosophy, is nothing like a computer.

...Dreyfus also identified a subtler assumption about the world. AI researchers (and futurists and science fiction writers) often assume that there is no limit to formal, scientific knowledge, because they assume that any phenomenon in the universe can be described by symbols or scientific theories. This assumes that everything that exists can be understood as objects, properties of objects, classes of objects, relations of objects, and so on: precisely those things that can be described by logic, language and mathematics. The question of what exists is called ontology, and so Dreyfus calls this "the ontological assumption:" If this is false, then it raises doubts about what we can ultimately know and on what intelligent machines will ultimately be able to help us to do.

...Our sense of the situation is based, Dreyfus argues, on our goals, our bodies and our culture—all of our unconscious intuitions, attitudes and knowledge about the world. This “context” or "background" (related to Heidegger's Dasein) is a form of knowledge that is not stored in our brains symbolically, but intuitively in some way. It affects what we notice and what we don't notice, what we expect and what possibilities we don't consider: we discriminate between what is essential and inessential. (Gladwell calls this "thin-slicing"). The things that are inessential are relegated to our "fringe consciousness" (borrowing a phrase from William James): the millions of things we're aware of, but we're not really thinking about right now.

dmb adds:
As I understand Pirsig's artful mechanic, he or she is so absorbed in the task that the tools and procedures are transparent to the overall goal and operation. This is very much like Heidegger's notion that we don't see the hammer as an external object while we're hammering or the way we can enter a room without even noticing the way we turned the door knob or turned on the light. We just do without deliberation or reflection. The words and the keyboard I'm presently using become transparent in the same way. I don't think about them or examine them so much as I just use them to achieve the overall goal, which is to make a point, express an idea. 

There is a short article that tells about some research that supports this view at http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/03/heidegger-tools/