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AI Magazine 

One observer's report on the Artificial Intelligence and Human Mind Confer A conference was held at Yale University entitled "Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind: An International, Interdisciplinary Symposium." I am a graduate student in AI at Yale and was surprised, along with my colleagues, to learn of this conference just two days before it began. The program included some very famous and impressive names, such as Sir John Eccles, the nobel laureate neurobiologist; the physicists Henry Margenau and Eugene Wigner; Marvin Minsky and Michael Arbib, both eminent AI researchers; and Hans Moravec and Doug Lenat, two younger stars of AI. Truth magazine, cess performed in order to solve a problem of a given size I disagreed because of my bias that evolution should pass the test and argued it didn't matter how much resources a process used to solve a problem, only whether it could. Then we went back to the lecture, just in time to hear some followup discussion after Margenau's talk, including Sir John singing the praises of the wonderful theory that Margenau had just outlined, which he was sure would lay the basis for a revolutionary new understanding of mind and brain I wondered what Eccles could be talking about, having heard only old theories from Margenau before I left the room I went to lunch with some other AI graduate students, and there I learned that Margenau had, near the end of his talk, advanced the theory that the mind acts on the brain by selecting among the possibilities permitted by quantum mechanics in such a way that the probabilistic predictions of quantum mechanics were still respected.