Steve,
You are brilliant. You said it much better than I could have. I am pending. Ben, Yes, some are wired, other emergent. The wired ones, we can deal with, the trouble is with the emergent ones. Besides, the wired ones were once emergent, then they got wired by evolution. So, perhaps, one could start with the emergent ones. Sergio From: Steve Richfield [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, September 04, 2012 11:17 AM To: AGI Subject: [agi] Emergent properties... It seems to me that some properties of large systems of neurons (brains) are fundamental, while others are emergent. Much of the controversies in many threads appear to reflect people's differing opinions as to what is fundamental, and what is emergent. To illustrate, in the smallest multi celled animals with neurons, like hydras, the neurons perform primarily process control functions. Even in us, our hypothalamus that performs process control functions seems to function largely independently of the rest of the brain. Hence, there are pretty good arguments that process control is fundamental. However, things that only man does well and some primates do poorly, like preplanning complex activities, is almost certainly an emergent property of some particular development in their nervous systems. Hence, there is probably nothing in our genomes or construction that is "designed" to do this, but rather, components that have been honed to do other things just happen to be able to do these things. Given the wide variation in things like "intelligence tests", we are apparently just barely able to do these things. These are the emergent properties. Of course, when a property emerges, it then gets refined by evolution so that the "line" between fundamental and emergent soon becomes blurred. It seems (to me) that the entire thrust of AGI is to DESIGN systems to be able to mimic the EMERGENT properties of neural systems, rather than "designing" systems to do other things, one of whose emergent properties happens to be GI. The world from this particular POV looks interesting, because the entire "AGI debate" looks a bit different: If AGI can be made to work, it would probably be MUCH more efficient than neural systems (which is one of AGI's selling points). However, there is absolutely NO evidence that this is even possible, because GI is an emergent property. Further, we have good evidence in that we took ~150 million years to evolve, that there is NO biologically-realizable direct solution to GI. Of course, this casually casts aside the central presumption of AGI, that we ARE a direct solution to GI. OTOH, Trying to design hyper-complex systems to have particular emergent properties would seem to be extremely difficult, probably requiring the same sort of experimentation as has been going on for the last 150 million years - or some sort of "direct readout" like neurological diagramming, etc. Of course, this casually casts aside the dreams of generations of NN developers. I suspect that a debate about which properties are emergent and how to design systems that do such things could quickly sort through the masses of AGI-related arguments. Steve AGI | <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now> Archives <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/18883996-f0d58d57> | <https://www.listbox.com/member/?&; ad2> Modify Your Subscription <http://www.listbox.com> ------------------------------------------- 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
