On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 4:38 PM, Derek Zahn <[email protected]> wrote:
> It is kind of mysterious to me why this works so well... Why should useful > abstract conceptual domains map so well onto concrete physical conceptual > domains? I call this "the unreasonable effectiveness of metaphor", and > hope someday to understand it. A lot of it comes from common properties of > causality; a lot comes from the also somewhat mysterious effectiveness of > mathematics; and a lot comes from the way we cherry-pick abstractions we > are capable of effectively thinking about in those terms... But there is a > deeper issue here too, though it is rather orthogonal to AGI per se. > In addition to the factors you mention, I think another consideration is that to be useful, an abstraction must ultimately map back to the concrete physical, simply because every train of thought, in order to be useful, must ultimately prescribe some physical action. Looked at that way, it becomes less surprising that abstractions which were originally inspired by the physical and must ultimately map back to the physical - and which must admit of at least some piecewise decomposition in order to be mentally tractable - are likely to have some capacity to be advised by physical metaphor along the way. (I think this is also the explanation for the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. At the time the phrase was coined, traditional mathematics was mostly inspired by physical space-time in the first place. Since then, we have discovered some other areas of mathematics e.g. large integers and cellular automata that don't really come from concrete reality; unsurprisingly, these branches have not turned out to be so useful.) ------------------------------------------- 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
