I truly think you'd be wasting your time - my belief is you have to start AGI-wise with a robot - and it's a fascinating subject to try and speculate how reflective memory evolved in stages from early organisms - because it's so massively expensive. *Human* reflective memory is massively visual and inordinately complicated. A worm - I think we can be confident - will have to have some kind of episodic memory of the journeys it undertakes from its burrow in search of burrow lining materials and food. Such memory will presumably be heavily kinaesthetic and can't be visual. The mind boggles at how even such more limited forms of memory could be laid down and edited in a simple brain.
I guess what occurs to me is that the process by which automatic routines are laid down as a result of an agent's first creative groping steps in the world, will be much the same process that underlies episodic memory. Both are probably memories of especially successful or unsuccessful sequences of bodily movements. Humans have an extraordinarily sophisticated episodic memory with capacities extremely evolved from early animals - for example, the capacity to remember a scene and see it from a POV *other* than one's own, and indeed to switch between the POV's of different subjects. Obviously my thoughts here, like Alan's, are tossed off in rambling fashion - this is all such relatively virgin territory. But they reinforce and extend my belief that instructions to the body to do things are the basis of all intelligence - and in this case of episodic memory. I repeat if you try and do a logical database approach to episodic memory you will achieve literally nothing. Shank didn't, did he? From: Piaget Modeler Sent: Monday, July 16, 2012 10:53 PM To: AGI Subject: RE: [agi] Episodes Mike, Good response. I like your movie editing analogy. As far as representation with a database or with scripts, we can take baby steps by building an initial Episodic Memory component, which does 0.01% of what you just suggested, and then incrementally improve it. Any other thoughts? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [agi] Episodes Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2012 22:42:12 +0100 An episode is captured in the brain in something like the form of a movie. And to understand how the brain can associate one sub-episode to another - and a particular episode in time to a comparable episode at another time - you have to understand *montage* and the art of cutting movies. That is to say, how a) particular shots and scenes/sequences of action are cut from a person's total life stream, and b) how given shots and scenes, once chosen, can then be recut and reassembled, and fitted together We are talking here about the art and psychology of imaginative ASSOCIATION - **fitting** images together. This is totally different from logic, where one logical variable inevitably FOLLOWS from another. A movie sequence might start with a scene of a gay party, cut to a scene of a fight at the party, cut to a scene of the party now almost empty with a few tired stragglers ... "the party started great, but then there was this big fight, and practically everyone left in a hurry, and it ended miserably" Language really follows sequences of association - as opposed to any logic. If you think you can express episodes in the form of some logical database, or Schank-like scripts, you're a dead man. Episodes, and how the brain handles episodes, are the expression of awesome "CGI" power on the part of the brain - still way beyond our computational comprehension, and requiring a whole new metacognitive medium of analysis. From: Piaget Modeler Sent: Monday, July 16, 2012 10:17 PM To: AGI Subject: [agi] Episodes Assume we are continuously feeding sensory input into a cognitive system, and the cognitive system is continuously performing actions (and non-actions). Can anyone succinctly describe what an episode is? When does one episode start and end, and when does another begin? Do they overlap? I have a working theory but I'd like to get feedback. Cheers! ~PM. AGI | Archives | Modify Your Subscription AGI | Archives | Modify Your Subscription AGI | Archives | Modify Your Subscription ------------------------------------------- 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
