I find it extremely unlikely that, out of all possible things, the specific way humans conceptualize persuasion and arguments would be a necessary requirement for any "mind" (which I take here as a 'sentient' algorithm in the largest sense) to function.
I don't have any experience with programming at all, and that may be the problem: I just don't see these reasons. To my mind (ha) a mind incapable of processing arguments, which is to say holding reasons in rational relations to each other or connecting premises and conclusions up in justificatory relations or whatever, isn't reasonably called a mind. This may just be a failure of imagination on my part So...
As another intuition, if we adopt the Occam/Solomonoff philosophy for what is required to have a "mind"
Could you explain this? I'm under the impression that being capable of solomonoff induction requires being capable of 1) holding beliefs, 2) making inferences about those beliefs, 3) changing beliefs. Yet this seems to me to be all that is required for 'understanding and being convinced by an argument'.
In my limited experience, UCMA supporters explicitly rejected the assertion that "arguments" and "being convinced by an argument" are equivalent to "evidence" and "performing a bayesian update on evidence". So those three would be enough for evidence and updates, but not enough for argument and persuasion according to my next-best-guess of what they mean by "argument" and "convinced".
For one, you need some kind of input system, and some process that looks at this input and connects it to pieces o... (read more)
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