John, This doesn’t make obvious sense to me – if it’s a reply to me.
OTOH it does make a kind of sense – because grading as distinct from measurement - crude as distinct from precise measured comparisons - is **fundamental** to language/conceptualisation. Vague grading is fundamental to adjectives, adverbs and verbs, - we describe people and things as: “brilliant/bright/fairly clever/reasonably intelligent/ dim/thick/ moronic” - “racing along/ running briskly/ jogging/ambling/creeping/crawling” – “huge/big/biggish/ middling / small/ petite / tiny - “beautiful/pretty/attractive/ plain/unattractive / ugly/ hideous” etc etc We normally use maths when we want to be specific and precise. In general, language is general and vague. Language/conceptualisation is the medium of A. General I. From: John G. Rose Sent: Wednesday, January 02, 2013 9:41 PM To: AGI Subject: RE: [agi] Why Logic & Maths Have Sweet FA to do with Real world reasoning The problem is that language restricts us in almost every way. We would need to communicate with essences somehow. Even if you say the “glleekal is gllockelled” the word “is” restricts it. Forget Lojban or any of that. The communication really will need to be in mathematical expressions. The mathematical expression can contain anything, known or unknown, fuzzy or exact. Protocol is important for this... I’ve thought a bit on that. A universal protocol. John From: Mike Tintner [mailto:[email protected]] Thankyou, John, for being gracious. You might care to consider one major and new point I made, tangentially, in the thread: **the system of emotions/sensation in any living creature is a system of “crude quantification”. It assesses how painful, bright, funny, delicious etc things are – but very very crudely. [“How painful [or delicious] was it?* “Oh it was very very painful” “As painful as all that?” “Well maybe not that painful, but certainly pretty painful”..] You could call this a system of GRADING as distinct from MEASUREMENT., Like the cultural system of grading used in the **vast bulk** of education. Essays and projects – and you would have to incl. all forms of real world reasoning, such as scientific theorising and experiments, and all mechanical designs, - and also all forms of creative artificial reasoning, such as new logicomathematical theorems and formulae - all of them can only be graded not measured. Saying s.o. got 45% on an essay is an entirely fictional and arbitrary measurement. There is no real physical way of measuring how good or true Godel’s theorem,say, is, or Mandelbrot’s fractals – or great a work is King Lear, or good a post is. Emotional grading” is a PRE-mathematical system of quantification. Unquestionably. About a billion years pre-mathematical if you care to look at evolution and history..And self-evidently, humans are the only living species in a million odd who have ever found need for maths – purely because they are the only ones that engage in complex activities involving large quantities of objects. An AGI robot will need such an emotional – crude quantifying - system. There are immense advantages to crude quanitification. - especially when you are dealing with phenomena that you simply can’t measure mathematically, with precision, according to precise yardsticks. An AGI will also need (if it were awesomely sophisticated and evolved) to grade culturally as we do. Grading (as opposed to measurement) is – as all our extensive cultural systems of assessment, demonstrate – an absolute necessity for dealing with the products of all forms of real world reasoning. All forms of real world reasoning,are, in fact, art forms not precise sciences. You cannot measure art forms. (You can grade them crudely, just not measure them precisely) And which criteria you apply to grading them is always arbitrary. There are indeed more things in heaven and earth than even mathematicians have considered. From: John G. Rose Sent: Wednesday, January 02, 2013 5:28 PM To: AGI Subject: RE: [agi] Why Logic & Maths Have Sweet FA to do with Real world reasoning OK, here’s the deal. Mike is partially right... that’s the problem with banning him. Existing languages actually inhibit our thinking and reasoning in many ways as does math. You have to jam or compress your thoughts into such a tight symbolistic bandwidth of conveyance. The human mind is capable of much more... As we become more educated in some ways we be become stupider. Future means of communication will require more symbols and bandwidth. I’ve studied this in depth when developing compression technology and experimenting with human short-term memory training software. Some of the best coders I’ve ever seen were 12 year old kids and older gents who flunked out of college and have never studied an ounce of math past basic algebra. A dog could be trained to write software with the right interface. Mike’s issue is that he needs math to articulate all this and that he doesn’t have. He’s in a hole, being required to reason logicomathematically about non-logicomathematical reasoning. So in effect he is banning himself. And making a lot of noise while doing it. John From: Logan Streondj [mailto:[email protected]] On Tue, Jan 1, 2013 at 11:02 PM, David Clark <[email protected]> wrote: I didn’t say CS wasn’t Math because I dislike Math! I think saying that programming and CS is Math makes bad code and ignores many CS issues that have nothing to do with Math. In 2000, I took 2, 3rd year Econometrics courses that in some 3 hour classes, had nothing but formulas on the board. This is still Economics even though Math was heavily used. Sure, math is used for a lot of things, so is language. I see math as a "domain-specific language". with HSPL I hope to make it more seameless integrated. As you may have noticed, many humans, and females in particular don't like the squiggly spatially-oriented math language. It's very cryptic and off putting. I haven’t looked up the definition for Math and Arithmetic but most people I have talked to, talk about Math being formulas with variables and Arithmetic being adding, subtracting etc. People use simple Arithmetic in normal daily life and don’t call retail sales Math. If you look up curriculum guidelines for the Math subject in elementary school, you'll find that counting and arithmetic is a major component. Retail sales may require at least some rudimentary math skills, when getting change for instance, though much has been outsourced to computers that do the actual tallying of product prices, calculating taxes and all that. There are many concepts in Math that don’t work in CS and programming and many techniques that are strictly related to CS. It seems that most PhD’s in Computer Science are given out for Math type work and are mostly awarded by Math Professors. For 10 years in the 1980’s I had a partner who was a full Math professor so I am lamenting the distortion that CS is seen as just some kind of Math. I have worked in the microcomputer field for the past 37 years and I hope I can be forgiven for feeling short changed by the Math fraternity. Us CS professionals just get no respect. For all the graduate student slave work and the work done by professors in CS, please tell me what major programming work has been accomplished by the ivory tower. Well, Gimp, and Google, likely among others. I know Haskell is considered an Ivory Tower language, or so I was told in the chat rooms, as it has a high percentage of Phd users. My experience tells me that is you can’t program, at least you can teach! Doesn’t say much for our field does it? It's one of the reasons I couldn't finish University. It was very difficult to understand how the formulas, and pictures related to programming. I understand words, and code. Like even in Linguistics, they had us drawing "syntax trees" :-|, I dono, just seems very silly, I've never needed to use them. Though it's hard to say how much, a significant quantity of university seems to be about making things more complicated, without necessarily doing anything useful. For example the field of philosophy, and epistemology in particular, that has been fighting over the definition of a few basic words for over a thousand years. How could I possibly know how a dead person would react to something? It's just preposterous, their dead, get over it. Yet that is the basis of a large amount of philosphy university curriculum. The AI major required taking philosophy, computer science, linguistics and psychology courses. It turned out to be so difficult, that they canceled it, so it's not really a big surprise I couldn't finish it. My experience also tells me that the best programming that has been made in the past 25 years was mostly done by a team of one rather than a team of programmers (Obviously there are many exceptions but it does seem strange.). that is quite reassuring thank you :-). Though yes, I'd have to agree, some of the greatest projects were at least started and brought to a working state by a team of one. Such as GCC, Linux kernel and Git. David Clark Maybe one day, when I could do a full AI major online, without having to go to some university, with all it's social trappings and be faced with professors I have great difficulty mustering any respect for. I'll be able to get a university degree. University as I look at it, is a great place to find a smart spouse, but ya now that I have, it's kinda pointless. I had to brave through years of rejecting sub-par females at Uni, it would just be too much of a hassle to have to do it again -- don't need any more "bro's" either. Too many people also in such a small area, just makes one sympathize with all those depopulation plans. I'd prefer to have a nice shore side wilderness property with me sailboat and me family, maybe some community members milling about. Anyways, seems at present we'll get there within a decade on our current trajectory. Though perhaps this AGI project or some related programming or book project could get us some extra money and community-members. We seem to have a lot of everything already though, money included. Guess it's a matter of perspective of course. Anyways ya, I don't really understand your woe's with the CS/Math university awards dichotomy. My suggestion is to write out in detail what you'd like to achieve, or have happen, and then allow it to happen, perhaps helping it along a little :-). It's the programming of the world sometimes called magic ;-), though I guess planning may be a word you'd prefer to use. From: Logan Streondj [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: December-31-12 11:47 PM To: AGI Subject: Re: [agi] Why Logic & Maths Have Sweet FA to do with Real world reasoning 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-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
