Hi Ben, I've just read your paper (Goertzel & Pennachin) at: http://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/2003/NovamenteSimulations.htm
I'm not expert in any of this - but I'm 10 years and three years into raising two kids so that gives me some experience that might or might not be useful I thought what you said made good sense. I've got two suggestions for modifications to your approach. One is that I wonder whether it's worth building into Novamente a pre- set predisposition to distinguish between 'me' and 'not' me. I would start by setting up in 'itch' to discover whether data flowing through Novamente is sourced from 'outside me' or from 'within me'. The second 'itch' would be to label data generated outside of 'me' as being to do with 'me' or to do with 'other'. I think a baby does the latter by noticing close correlations between internal feelings/intentions and seeing things happen 'outside' - I send messages to my arms/legs and I see objects move in a closely correlated way (turns out that as often as not I see my arms and legs move, etc.). Another itch that I imagine you already have built into Novamente is to try to find closely correlated streams of data - this would tend to speed the process of creating 'objects' or standard actions. It might be worth running a few experiments to see if it significantly speeds up learning for a Novababy to have the 'itches' about 'me' / 'not me' built in at the start. Another thought is about the way you've split leaning into direct environmental learning, learning to be taught, and then learning symbolic communication. I think learning symbolic communication is inseparable from learnng to be taught. And direct environmental learning is inseparable from the precursors to speech. I'll explain what I mean. A long time ago I picked up at second hand a rather crude notion of the Piagetian stages of learning. What I absorbed was the notion that Piaget said that kids must first learn concretely before learning abstractly. This had a surface common sense ring to it, but I've now decided that I don't at all agree that concrete learning has to preceed abstract learning. I have two reasons for thinking this. When babies are in the ealiest stages of development I think they face the hardest possible learning tasks - they are getting a staggering stream of sensory input data - most of which is meaningless. Out of this they have to sift signals that are meaningful - so from the minute their brains are able to process input data (while in utero) they engage in abstract learning - take the stream of raw data and abstract from it...........so a tight coupling of environmental experience and abstract thinking is required form the first moment of mental capability. Babies are undoubtedly pre-programmed to be alert to certain patterns of data. This might be useful to get the baby responding in ways that helps its immediate survival. But it might be that the pre-programing sets up a process of awareness crystalisation - certain streams of data can be treated as meaningful - and then out of the soup of other non-meaningful data additional correlations to the currently meaningful data can be developed - a bit like the way we do jigsaw puzzles. So, I think that the process of streaming data into objects and actions and relationships and characteristics is already a proccess of abstract learning. The second reason for thinging that abstract thinking starts very early in human babies is that their primary carers are talking to them all the time - of using highly abstract notions like "I love you", "you georgeous little thing", "how clever", "oh, don't be messy" etc. etc. The baby hears the words (jigsaw puzzle-like at first - ie. a fuzzy set of sounds in amongst other words they know) and then over time they associate behaviours, feelings, settings, other known words, etc. that invest these abstract terms with more and more meaning. But the abstract symbol comes first and the meaning later. The words are like pegs to hang meaning on. Given these ways of seeing things, it's not hard to say that 'learning to learn from a teacher' is already a process of symbolic learning. If a robot is circling another object and hoping the NovaBaby will realise that it wants the NovaBaby to go and get the object (or whatever) then it is teaching symbolic communication. But it's just doing it in a way that a mute person would teach it or the way that it would have to teach it to a deaf child. This form of teaching is no less abstract that the use of verbal symbols and it is no easier to learn (might even be harder as the action might not correlate so uniquely to the symbolic meaning that the teacher is trying to convey). My first child started speaking at 8 months and he was clearly understanding words long before that - so my guess is that symbolic reasoning starts very, very early - and that language take-off is more to do with gaining critical mass of symbols and then later getting the motor coordination of the voice box to be able to reproduce words than it is to do with the raw capacity for abstract reasoning or symbolic communication. The core notion of symbolic communication I would guess starts from the minute that the child distinguished self from other (ie there's a need for a form of communication that goes beyond just having a thought in one's head). So, I think that the teacher should talk to a NovaBaby from moment one and that a NovaBaby should be equipped to receive text and send text messages from moment one. In terms of senbding text, all it needs is the ability to select and then send sub-strings out of the input strings that it receives. If the teacher reacts to the random imitative babble from the NovaBaby then it will probably learning that certain sub-strings are meaningful in special ways. All animals that can hear are surrounded with sound and start processing it well before they are born (or hatched!). But then they have to process the sound into symbolically meaningfull concepts (my carer's voice, the sound of the wind,..) If a NovaBaby was surrounded by text it would very quickly start making correlations between it another other aspects of the environment. That is, for a NovaBaby (if given the opportunity) text would be a fundamental part of the environment from the first moment and would not be something that only emerges as being meaningful a long waydown the track. ie. for a NovaBaby text could be a natural mode of communication well before the more complicated spoken word became accessible - the spoken word is a much harder thing to process. If in a simulated world the data fed to NovaBabies is already highly abstracted (the noise to meaning ratio is very low) then NovaBabies might be able to be very intelligent with a fraction of the computing power that animals need - since a good proportion of the grey matter of animals is taken up with the task of abstracting the data from a simply staggering amount of noise. (Ah well. For somebody who's not an expert in any of this I sure have plenty of opinions!) Cheers, Philip ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
