Stan, Thanks for your thoughts. You have very valid points. By the way, when you send a reply, the AGI list appears to be getting two messages instead of one. I tend to use the word "affect" to mean an instantaneous evaluation of the current situation, which maps it into a positive or negative value (between -1 and 1) along several "emotional" dimensions. I tend to use the word "mood" to mean the average of these values over some timeframe. Somehow there must be a link between these affect and mood values (the somatic tags) and the selected goals. I just have to figure out what the right linkages are. Perhaps an "Evaluation"predicate can link them. Not sure just yet. Finally, an "intuition" I think is a culminating response / decision involving the affects and moods and goals. Cheers.
Date: Fri, 17 May 2013 16:32:12 -0600 From: [email protected] To: [email protected] CC: [email protected] Subject: Re: [agi] Goal Selection On 05/16/2013 11:19 PM, Piaget Modeler wrote: Stanley, Thagard's work on coherence is pretty interesting. He combines it with Damasio's work to form a pretty cogent theory. Similar to yours... http://cogsci.uwaterloo.ca/Articles/Pages/how-to-decide.html http://cogsci.uwaterloo.ca/Articles/Pages/Inference.Plan.html http://cogsci.uwaterloo.ca/Articles/Pages/Emot.Decis.html http://cogsci.uwaterloo.ca/Articles/Pages/Empathy.html Cheers. ~PM PM, Just read a little of the first article. I immediately see that Thegard and I differ in a few important ways. First, Thegard speaks of emotions as an initial reaction and then quickly calls this the "gut reaction." For me, emotion is more of a continuum and the two ends of the spectrum are vastly different. At one end is the "triggered" response which occurs quickly and subconsciously. There isn't much we can do about this kind of emotion except to "condition" ones self to react differently. The other end of the spectrum is more interesting and equally as valuable (my opinion.) A good example of this "other" type of emotion is what we experience and describe as "I just knew it was the right thing." In other words, we "felt" the rightness of a path or choice. Personally, I wouldn't call that emotion, but others consider any "feeling" to be emotion. If anything, I would call this the "intuition" experience. I argue that the "intuition" end of the spectrum is natural and a desirable mental state to arrive at. Remember the explanations as to how Watson came to the point of "buzzing in" during the Jeopardy competition? Watson was able to integrate several aspects of the "problem" of fitting an answer to the clues. My understanding was that it used something like experts in various categories. The ratings or rankings of these various components were then "summed" into a number and if the number was "big enough" then Watson buzzed in. Could say "Watson was confident enough..." or that Watson was "hefty" enough to weigh in... It starts to sound like "Watson felt like buzzing." I believe this is what "deep" human thought is really about - taking the "sum" of various ways of looking at the issue and seeing what that net result feels like. (don't confuse me with facts about how mathematicians and artists think :-) ) Notice the "feels" like. How else would one deal with a summary of various unrelated aspects? We recognize that some aspects of a car are more important to us than others, but we arrive at the point of decision with a "net" feeling - we think the deal is right. I suspect that there is also a "feeling" of not accepting - which leads to more search and analysis. Using "how one feels immediately" is not a good strategy for making decisions. Any view/cognition needs to be supported by features that are external, or logically evident. Using gut reaction for evidence is giving your ignorance too much say so. Quick gut reaction may aid in helping to steer us into proper ways of looking at situation, but it should never be used as "evidence" of our rightness. To bring this around to machine choices,.. the arbitrator will likely compare two "merit" numbers and choose the higher merit. Merit is highly abstract - that is, it doesn't have a characteristic that tells where it came from. (not saying we can't investigate the process of asserting merit, but the arbitrator wouldn't do that.) Lately I've come to see that we don't have to invent "merit" or have a machine to calculate it - we simply need to collect it from various sources that we trust. (an AGI may aspire to calculate merit one day - but that is for the mature, not the novice.) My new saying... "I don't expect a design of a car to specify how to create gasoline - the gas is fuel for the car, not the "car" invention. Likewise, an AGI doesn't have to have mechanisms that "produce" judgments - judgments are the fuel aspect of an AGI. An AGI needs to be a collector and user of what's out there." PM Thanks for the reference to Thegard - I'll read more, but his low opinion of intuition is hard for me to accept. Stan 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
