Sergio and Jim, On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 12:15 PM, Jim Bromer <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 11:04 AM, Sergio Pissanetzky < > [email protected]> wrote: > Jim, > > thanks. I was thinking about how we use prediction for survival. Without > prediction I would put my hand in the fire and leave it there, because I > would not be able to predict that fire causes pain. > There is absolutely nothing that you know for absolutely sure. Realizing this can sometimes save your life. I remember being camped near a high-altitude frozen pond above Blanka Lake in the Cascade Mountains without adequate clothing. My brother and I built a fire, but there was no dried out wood, so while the flames looked hot, they were not. We spent the night with our hands in the flames, burned all the hair off of the backs of our hands, but the flames felt like warm air and did NOT burn our hands. Had we "known" not to put our hands into the flames, I might not now have fingers to write this. Or that food is good for hunger. > Of course, there are plenty of things that you should NOT eat to satisfy your hunger. > Just like a tree. Locomotion goes with prediction, without it I would be > able to avoid pain, or seek food. Just like a tree. That's why we have a > brain, to predict and to move. > I believe that "prediction" is just a special case where the probability is high. Probabilities are never 100.0000000% Steve ======================= > Sergio > > Yes, prediction is an important method of human thought. Perhaps I should > have focused on saying that "prediction" as it has stood so far has not > been reliable in producing higher intelligence. That seems like a strange > idea since it is so useful in native intelligence. > > Much of our knowledge is based on non-causative relations. It is useful > because we do not usually see the full scope of the causal relations. (The > use of terms like, "full scope" become philosophically defeasible when we > are talking about knowing because it is only by limiting the scope of what > we are thinking about could we then say that we understand the full scope > of that idea.) Similarly, much of our knowing is not based on hard edged > prediction. But for the most part, if you can't get the airplane off the > ground you cannot reliably discover advanced methods to improve the flight > characteristics of the aircraft. > > What has happened is that we have discovered that our thinking is both > more complicated then we imagined and more mysterious than we thought it > should be at the beginning of the information age. > > On the other hand we can create extreme situations where the human mind > fails just as our AGI programs have or would fail (for less extreme > situations). For example, even if you could reliably pick out a number of > objects in a scene, by reducing the light on the scene sufficiently, your > analysis would fail just as miserably as most AGI programs would fail. > This is an important thought experiment because it does reveal that the > human mind is capable of effectively using a wider variety of methods in > analyzing scenes than a computer program is. (This is a conclusion but it > is a reasonable conclusion.) This then shows that theory behind AGI is not > totally wrong. We can buttress this conclusion by pointing out that if the > lighting of a scene (imagine an industrial setting) could be guaranteed to > produce ideal lighting, many visual AI methods would succeed. If a > researcher could establish what kinds of AI methods would work in the ideal > situations, he could then systematically move to deal with individual > variations that tend to produce worse results. And so on. > > Jim Bromer > *AGI* | Archives <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now> > <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/10443978-6f4c28ac> | > Modify<https://www.listbox.com/member/?&;>Your Subscription > <http://www.listbox.com> > -- Full employment can be had with the stoke of a pen. Simply institute a six hour workday. That will easily create enough new jobs to bring back full employment. ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-c97d2393 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-2484a968 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
