>From the rewrite-in-progress of the User Manual -- 1.3 Does MindForth think?
The whole purpose of Mind.Forth is to think. It is an embodiment of the Cartesian Cogito ergo sum -- "I think, therefore I am." Mind.Forth does indeed think, but the real questions here are, how does Mind.Forth think, and what proof is there that Mind.Forth thinks? Mind.Forth thinks by having concepts at a deep level in the artificial mind, and by letting activation spread from one concept to another to another in a chain of thought under the guidance of a Chomskyan linguistic superstructure (syntax). Even without the syntax -- Greek for "ordering together" -- Mind.Forth would be able to associate from concept to concept and exhibit the purposive behavior of an animal such as, say, a dog, which shows a certain level of understanding in a complex activity such as inviting a human being to throw a stick and then chasing and fetching the stick and bringing it back and laying it on the ground. In fact, up until late 2001, the Mind.Forth algorithm tried to think all the concepts in a three-word sentence at once. The software would simultaneously activate the three words of three concepts in a subject-verb-object (SVO) order and proceed to generate a sentence with the three active words. Then one of those funny things happened on the way to the Singularity. In the AI Mind programming, the question arose whether the linguistic superstructure should "reach down," as it were, and activate the entire incipient sentence as a finished product of mind, or -- and here was a major confontation with the unknown quandaries of AI -- should the governing syntax reach down into the conceptual grid and not only activate one concept at a time, but also let the activated concept "have a say," so to speak, in the selection of the next concept to activate, and then likewise from the current concept on to the next concept? And should the chain of thought not be determined in advance, but rather unfold in the very process of generating an idea? The Mind.Forth author Mentifex decided to adopt the method of letting each concept in the chain determine the direction of the chain, and Mentifex suddenly realized that the thought process of such a linguistically guided mechanism was inherently more powerful than the simple, underlying alternative of letting concepts activate each other in a loose, unguided chaining of activations. In other words, syntactically guided thinking, as invented rather blindly by human beings, gives rise to the Albert Einsteins and the Benjamin Goertzels of this world. Now, what proof is there that Mind.Forth thinks? The proof is in what Dr. Goertzel calls an "existence proof." Run the AI mind and observe, s'il vous plait, that thinking occurs. The thinking is very primitive indeed, but we are at the dawn of True AI in the world. The reason why Mind.Forth exhibits thinking, when other ambitious AI projects have failed to do so, is that Mind.Forth implements its own unique theory of mind. It was far more difficult for the independent AI scholar Mentifex to develop the theory of mind for MindForth than to write the MindForth software, although both endeavors each took over a dozen years of work. The Wright borthers figured out the theory of flight, and then they made and flew the first airplane in 1903. There are people who try to create an AI without having a theory of AI, and if they are lucky a theory will come to them along the way. With Mind.Forth you get the theory and the AI. ATM -- http://mentifex.virtualentity.com/mind4th.html http://mentifex.virtualentity.com/m4thuser.html ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=94603346-a08d2f
