Physicists get the need for replication, but totally miss the need for the observer in science. Neuroscientists are examine the physics of the observer, and total miss the role of replication in science. Sheesh this is hard.
This is in my response to Ben posted at TheConversation (copied below). The people at CERN have spent their billions replicating things in the supercollider to understand what is going on because they admit their models are frayed around the edges, and computing can't get at them. What craziness is it that justifies a case for that the most complex thing in the universe can be understood without ever having properly tried replication? Cheers Colin ============================================= Hi Ben, All your comments are valid. But, as I just posted above (modified slightly), none of it justifies the total lack of replication approaches in the face of 60+ years of AGI failure. *************** What I am saying is that I do not know for sure. You do not know. _Nobody_ knows because the basic exploration has not been completed because the necessary replication (as practised everywhere else in science) has not been carried out yet.Until we do the exploration properly we cannot model it. We cannot know what cannot be modelled and what can. 60+ years ago, when the magic of computers was born, we started simulating models and somewhere along the way we forgot that the usual way to explore the natural world is to replicate phenomena to get the right model. Then we know the simulation works. We started simulating too early, kept going generationally, and now we habituate simulation. We need to return and complete the exploration. 60+ years of AGI failure, an obvious and unique anomaly in our exploratory behaviour, and a raft of oddities established on a discipline-wide basis that reinforces the belief system that keeps it all going despite no scientific confirmaiton of the premises inolved. What have we missed? Well it must be something _really important_ because we keep on simulating and we keep on failing. How many more decades of failure will it take to make people realise that maybe, just maybe, the glaring lack of the replication approach might be a good bet? What manner of strangness is involved that we keep going, year after year after year on the basis of an uproved hypothesis? It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to see that maybe non-zero $ aimed at replication might actually be a massively leveraged route to some level of explanation for the failure. I am not saying abandon AI projects. I am saying that replication could benefit the entire arena by having some level of investment, rather than zero. ********* BTW If anyone wants to see the status of the Church-Turing Thesis as a presupposed (unproved) hypothesis Look here at the very first paragraphs. http://www.worldscinet.com/ijmc/04/0401/free-access/S179384301240001X.pdf ********* The kind of chip architecture I plan is more possible (indeed easier) than ever before. Once I have the basic device sorted out, I should be able to do a whole ant or bee brain in the first few scaled up versions. The numbers are simply not that great. One of the useful aspects of the lateness is that chip fabrication techniques are developed beyond what is needed. This could have been done in the 1970s! The most massive brain simulator ever is planned. $Billions. I predict that simulator will be a very useful tool to explore models of human cognition, but that it is not an example of cognition. It will underperform in the mysteriious way that all these projects have underperformed: in the face of novelty the dynamics of learning will be fragile and poor. I estimate $200,000 spent on actual replication could give us the missing AGI ingredient, and prove the $billions wasted. If I was assesing risk, I'd spend the $200,000 to at least make sure I was fully informed. The people at CERN have spent their billions replicating things in the supercollider to understand what is going on because they admit their models are frayed around the edges, and computing can't get at them. What craziness is it that justifies a case for that the most complex thing in the universe can be understood without ever having properly tried replication? cheers Colin From: Ben Goertzel [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, 26 June 2012 12:58 PM To: AGI Subject: Re: [agi] Happy 100th Birthday Alan Turing - No, computers will never think, but machines will! Colin, Your analogies, to fire, flight etc., are rather screwily drawn. Let's say the goal of manned flight is to lift humans high up in the air and move them to a different point in the world, and then let them down without killing them. This is an empirical test criterion, and one can measure whether it's been done or not via purely functional observations, without needing to know about the mechanisms. The Wright Brothers did it without feathers and flapping wings, and what they did still counts as manned flight. Similarly, let's say (for sake of discussion) that the initial goal of AGI is to make a robot that can get PhDs in every field in a top university, going through exactly the same steps as a human would in order to get these PhDs. Then, we should rate a robot as succeeding at this test, if it can get the PhDs -- without worrying about whether its robo-brain is made of traditional silicon chips running a traditional computational process, or some kind of quantum computing process, or a detailed brain simulation, or whatever. If you want to hypothesize that there is no way to make a robot that will pass this test, using a digital computer brain -- OK, that's a scientific hypothesis, on which you have a different intuition than most AGI researchers. But you are going beyond just positing this sort of hypothesis. Instead, you're claiming that those of us who believe a digital computer brain is enough to achieve human-level intelligent behavior, are making some dumb elementary logic error of conflating the map for the territory. Uh, no. We are just following the hypothesis that one kind of physical system (digital computers) can achieve the same sorts of behavioral functions as another kind of physical system (human brains). This is not some logic error or philosophical error, it's just a scientific hypothesis that you happen to disagree with. It does seem to be the case that digital computers have done a lot of stuff that it was previously thought only human brains could do (play chess, assemble things in factories, categorize documents, and so forth). But we don't have digital computer based AGI yet, or any other kind of AGI, so your hypothesis is scientifically plausible and can't be considered refuted. However, you haven't drawn any specific, convincing connections between the posited trans-computational aspects of the human brain, and actual properties of human thought. Roger Penrose and Selmer Bringsjord have tried to do this, but IMO not very compellingly. Another tricky issue is that all scientific data ever collected, comprises a large finite bit-set. Any finite bit-set can be modeled using a computational model, e.g. a finite-state machine. So, there is no rigorous scientific way to distinguish a computable from a non-computable system. The Church-Turing Thesis can't be scientifically proven, but nor can your opposing view. Even if you turn out to be right that building digital computers is incapable of achieving human-level AGI, but building physical systems emulating brain physics is capable of it --- this STILL will not prove that the universe, including your brain emulation systems, is not computable. There is no scientific way to distinguish a non-computable system, from a computable system whose algorithmic information is much larger than that of your own brain. This is because all scientific data comprises a large finite bit-set. You could never scientifically disprove the hypothesis that these "brain physics" based machines of yours are just computers with larger algorithmic information than our brains, but modeling them explicitly as computers is beyond our capability and beyond the bit-set of total scientific data. -- Ben Goertzel On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 10:21 PM, Jim Bromer <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Manned flight was first achieved in the 18th century. The idea of using moving parts of some kind took off at the end of the 19th century. I am not sure why the idea became so popular at that time. But my guess is that there was something compelling about the possibility of using the smaller and lighter engines that were just becoming available at that time. Powered flight became possible because certain advancements in technology became available at that time. I know that one of the advancements that made practical automobiles possible and airplanes theoretically possible was the machining of engine parts. This process could be used so that the parts of the engine block that had to be strong could be left thick (as they came out of the casting mold) but other parts could be thinned down, dramatically increasing the power to weight ratio of the motors. Although the experimental method, going out there and trying actual experiments, was an important aspect of the invention of the modern airplane, the comparison of 60 years of building simulators to the problem of developing AGI is as insipid as it was fantastic. The fact is that Orville DID use simulation! He created the wind tunnel. And he conducted an experiment to determine what the attack angle of the wing should be on the handlebars of his bicycle! He was simulating what would happen during flight in order to determine how to better design his airplane even though no one had designed a working airplane at that time. What I find most amazing about this second simulation is that he realized that the propeller of his plane should have a curved shape because he found that the attack angle (the angle of the wing as it moved as it moved into the airflow) was most efficient at different angles at different speeds and since the parts of the propeller at different distances from the center were turning at different speeds as it was rotated this implied that the attack angle of the propeller should be different at different distances from the center. This made his airplane design much more efficient. Of course the most significant simulations that the Wrights used were the gliders that they launched down the hills or sand dunes at Kill Devil Hills. Powered flight became possible when enough advances in technology made it possible. The Wright Brothers not only were able to use this technology they also invented some of it, and significantly, they used simulations to make critical design decisions. Your metaphor is nonsense. Jim Bromer On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 9:29 PM, Colin Geoffrey Hales <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: At least, if I have anything to do with it.... http://www.theconversation.edu.au/the-modern-phlogiston-why-thinking-machines-dont-need-computers-7881 Cheers Colin AGI | Archives<https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now> Error! Filename not specified.<https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/10561250-164650b2>| Modify<https://www.listbox.com/member/?&;> Your Subscription Error! 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