Ben: It seems you persistently confuse the subjective feeling that humans have
when conducting an activity, with the underlying mechanisms that enable them to
perform the activity.
No, as with patchworks, you're not prepared to make the mental leap necessary
to look at the world in a different way.
To complete my line of argument - the brain's alphabet of basic forms can be
seen as comprising a "vocabulary" of body **shapes**. Art is primarily about
shapes. In fact, as the art of Arcimboldo, Chuck Close & others demonstrate, we
often actually don't need the component forms of those shapes to recognize
them. Faces can be painted of component forms like fruit, plates, and geometric
figures - and we can still recognize them from their basic shapes.
Dance and physical movement and embodied understanding of other bodies are
directed primarily by shapes. We dance primarily by having an image of the
shape we wish to achieve. We understand others' body movements by "putting
ourself into the position(/SHAPE)" of their bodies. We start from shapes, not
from a part-by-part, organ-by-organ, muscle-by-muscle analysis. You have an
idea of the shape of body movement you want to aim for, and that is what
informs your actual dance movements. Ditto we understand how Matisse's Dancers
dance with no information about their bodies other than their outline shapes,
and from those shapes alone we can get up and dance like them.
So when I talk about the ART OF MOVEMENT, I am talking primarily about the
shapes and shaping of movement. Art is about real world shapes. Geometry is
only a means for "analysing" shapes into artificial regular components like
triangles and circles. But it does not offer a vocabulary of real world body
shapes as art does. And it does not even offer a sub-vocabulary of real world
components, like hearts, livers, nerves, neuronal networks, hands, fingers,
toes.
Successful AGI robots will also think in terms of shapes. It's possible - you
have to use imagination and be prepared to think differently.
I'm trying to explain why AGI is getting nowhere - and point to the new
directions it must take. You're trying to defend the indefensible old
directions.
From: Ben Goertzel
Sent: Thursday, June 07, 2012 6:19 PM
To: AGI
Subject: Re: [agi] The Visual Alphabet
Mike T,
The "so what" is this - while I take your point, Ben, I doubt that any AGI
exercises, a la Poggio & Arel, are actually going to be any better - once you
allow for the fact that AGI-tests are always on much more heavily controlled &
selected/ "configured" materials.
I understand your feelings, but the Google results are irrelevant to the
success of AGI methods.
That's like saying the Wright Brothers were doomed to fail, based on the
evidence that Icarus-type flight methods failed ;p .... The failure of one
sort of method, does not doom all other approaches.... If you see all
different AI / AGI methods as basically the same, that's just because you have
terrible vision ...
Do you have any tests that show any real AGI promise whatsoever?
No tests that would impress skeptics, let alone an anti-rational ideologue such
as yourself ;)
Similarly, before the Wright Brothers first flight, they had no test results
that would have impressed skeptics or anti-flight ideologues. Flight skeptics
sure wouldn't have given a rat's ass about the wind tunnel tests they did while
perfecting their wings...
The thesis I wish to play with is that just as words reduce to letters, so do
visual forms reduce to a basic alphabet of abstract forms (albeit not a
precise, closed alphabet) - which would include such basic units as the blob,
wedge, chunk, (irregular), and the circle, triangle, square, (regular) and
straight and zig-zag or wavy lines.
And a Google or more AGI exercise of recognition may be able to, with some
mild but unimpressive success, identify similar basic forms.
There is a fairly obscure approach to computer vision, called image grammars,
that works as you're suggesting. Indeed, its results are pretty poor so far.
Google's image processing works based on totally unrelated methods, that use
statistical and machine learning methods to find highly complex mathematical
combinations of large numbers of very low-level image features (much lower
level than the "basic units" you mention) that imitate human image
categorization judgments.
Your fascination with these topics is admirable, but you repeatedly demonstrate
that you lack the technical background to really understand the things you're
talking about ;-p ...
****
P.S. I was looking for a phrase as I wrote this & I may have got it - it's
not enough to know about the physics and biomechanics of movement, in order to
understand bodies - you have to know about the ART OF MOVEMENT. Human and
animal movement are indeed an art - both in terms of production and the final
forms of movement. Knowing about biomechanics will not help you understand or
predict the infinitely open-ended range of dances that humans keep producing.
Understanding and creating those dances is literally, technically, an art/art
form - just as drawing dancers is.
***
This kind of argumentation is very uninteresting at the current stage, because
chess masters would also argue that chess is an art form too. Also, I feel
like doing integrals in calculus is an art form, but Mathematica does them
better than me. Basically, whatever AI hasn't conquered yet, will be called a
"art form that computers can't emulate" -- until AI has conquered it, and then
it gets crossed off the list ;p
It seems you persistently confuse the subjective feeling that humans have when
conducting an activity, with the underlying mechanisms that enable them to
perform the activity.
For example, if we fall in love, we may feel that our beloved is the most
beautiful and amazing person in the world. But that doesn't make it
objectively true.
Similarly, we may feel that we are carrying out some amazing non-computational
intuitive process when we move our pawn on the chess board, or raise our arm
while playing tennis But that doesn't make it so, from a physical and
scientific perspective.
These are elementary philosophical errors you're making, but you seem to be
stuck in a rut of sorts, and maybe you won't ever get out, unless someone
forcibly modifies your brain. I have a strange feeling that, even if you were
shown an AGI that could do everything a human can do, you still wouldn't
believe it was **really** intelligent, and would just consider it an irrelevant
parlor trick ;) ...
-- Ben G
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