Philip,

My idea is that action-framing and environment-monitoring are carried out in
a unified way in Units assigned to these tasks generically.  You seem to
want them to be done in a subdivided way, where actions and perceptions with
different motivations are carried out in different Units.  But I don't think
this is dynamically sound in a Novamente context.

If you have separate Units proposing actions in the same interaction
channel, then you also need a special mediator Unit to look at all the
proposed actions from the different Units and combine them.  This places at
the inter-Unit level, a process that in novamente should be at the
inter-Atom/inter-map level (action mediation and synthesis).  It seems like
an architectural mess, to me...

In general, what guides action-framing and environment-monitoring are

a) explicit goal-seeking behavior as embodied in Goalnodes
b) spontaneous self-organizing system behavior

In my approach, ethical thought gets to affect system behavior indirectly
through a), via ethically-motivated GoalNodes, both general ones and
context-specific ones.  Thus, the role of the ethics Unit I posited would be
create ethically-motivated Goalnodes, which would then be exported to the
generic action-framing and environment-monitoring Units to live and work
along with the other Goalnodes.

-- Ben


> Ben,
>
> > I agree that a functionally-specialized Ethics Unit could make sense in
> > an advanced Novamente configuration. .....devoting a Unit to ethics
> > goal-refinement on an architectural level would be a simple way of
> > ensuring resource allocation to "ethics processing" through successive
> > system revisions.
>
> OK.  That's good.
>
> You've dicussed this in terms of GoalNode refinement.  I probably don't
> understand the full range of what this means but my understanding of
> how ethics works is that an ethical sentient being starts with some
> general ethic goals (some hardwired, some taught and all blended!)
> and then the entity (a) frames action motivated by the ethics and (b)
> monitors the environment and internal processes to see if issues come
> up that call for an ethical response - then any or all the following
> happen - the goals might be refined so that it's possible to apply the
> goals to the complex current context and/or the entity goes on to
> formulate actions informed by the ethical cogitation.
>
> So on the face of it an Ethics Unit of an AGI would need to do more
> than GoalNode refinement??  Or have I missed the point?
>
> Cheer, Philip
>
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