Josh, I talked with Sam Adams at AGI 2008, and as always Sam was saying some interesting stuff including that his Joshua blue approach was very involved with feedback loops. He said it is traditional to try to avoid too many simultaneous feedback loops because people always think having multiple simultaneous feedback loops tend to lead to chaotic systems, but he had found, if you do the engineering correctly, and he emphasized he was an engineer, having millions of feedback loops actually adds to stability because the larger number tends to add more statistical evenness to the feedback, and it makes things less jerky. So he claimed he was confident threats of chaos preventing AGI were baseless (are you reading this R.L.).
So at least one AGI researcher is very interested in feedback loops. With regard to the green circle labeled "conscious spotlight" being "a miracle" I don't think is hard to imagine how a theater of mind type of consciousness in might works. With regard to the secret sauce of getting all the bottom-up, top-down, and latter implication and constraints to work together well and efficiently in a large system --- this strikes me as one of the major challenges, and its one I am not personally trained to speak about knowledgeably. In my original thread in this paper when I talked about the challenge of getting an AGI to all to work together well automatically, this was one of the challenges I had in mind. But I view that more as experimental and engineering problem than a conceptual one. Ed Porter ----Original Message----- From: J Storrs Hall, PhD [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, April 21, 2008 7:05 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: [agi] WHAT ARE THE MISSING CONCEPTUAL PIECES IN AGI? On Monday 21 April 2008 05:33:01 pm, Ed Porter wrote: > I don't think your 5 steps do justice to the more sophisticated views of AGI > that are out their. It was, as I said, a caricature. However, look, e.g., at the overview graphic of this LIDA paper (page 8) http://bernardbaars.pbwiki.com/f/Baars+&+Franklin+GW-IDA+Summary+in+NeuralNe ts2007.pdf (the green circle is step 3). > No miracles occur, other > than massively complex spreading activation, implication, and constraint > relaxation, thresholding, attention selection, and focusing, and selection > and context appropriate instantiation of mental and physical behaviors. That "miracle occurs" was not to be interpreted as meaning that the miracle occurred without mechanism but, I hoped, to be recognized as a tongue in cheek way of saying that that this was the point where each system put its (different) "secret sauce". > If you have read my responses in this thread one of their common themes is > how both perception up from lower levels and instantiation of higher levels > concepts and behaviors is context appropriate. Being context appropriate > involves a combination of both bottom-up, top-down, and lateral implication. Sure. And people have talked about steering of attention, Steve Reed mentioned following moving objects, and so forth. But I haven't seen it given a *primary* place in the architecture -- whenever anybody's architecture gets boiled down to a 20-module overview, it disappears. > So I don't view your alleged missing conceptual piece to be actually missing > from the better AGI thinking. But until we actually try building > systems ... I have yet to see anyone give a consistent, general, overall theory of the role of feedback in *every* cognitive process. It gets thrown in piecemeal on an ad hoc basis as a kludge here and there. (and yes, there are lots of specific examples of feedback in many of the architectures, particularly the robotics-derived ones). You see, I happen to think that there *is* a consistent, general, overall theory of the function of feedback throughout the architecture. And I think that once it's understood and widely applied, a lot of the architectures (repeat: a *lot* of the architectures) we have floating around here will suddenly start working a lot better. Josh ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?&; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
