There is a lot of evidence that humans, like other animals, learn incrementally. However, my belief is that because we use ideas in different ways a new idea can interact with other ideas. There are moments when something that is learned incrementally can be leveraged to produce leaps of insight. I call this knowledge structural because it means that an idea can suddenly provide some greater structure to knowledge related to a particular subject. The new increment of knowledge that triggers the structural insight may or may not be the key that provides the leverage of the structure. It may be that some new piece of knowledge just helps to crystalize some structure in a way that helps the learner to better utilize other knowledge.
In programming and computational mathematics we find distinctions between things like operators and operands and you have to be able to find distinctions between other different parts of a computation if you want to use mathematics creatively. However, I think it is obvious that the situation is more dynamic and more fluid in thought. Some information may play some role based on some other information so that it can react with some other information and we just cannot categorize how some piece of information might be used before hand. An AGI program has to be able to find how information can work together to create greater structures of knowledge. But for this to happen, the program has to be designed to provide the structure that will ensure that the potential to build learned structures is there. Jim Bromer ------------------------------------------- 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
