On Sun, 24 Oct 2004, Ben Goertzel wrote:
One idea proposed by Minsky at that conference is something I disagree with pretty radically. He says that until we understand human-level intelligence, we should make our theories of mind as complex as possible, rather than simplifying them -- for fear of leaving something out! This reminds me of some of the mistakes we made at Webmind Inc. I believe our approach to AI there was fundamentally sound, yet the theory underlying it (not the philosophy of mind, but the intermediate level computational-cog-sci theory) was too complex which led to a software system that was too large and complex and hard to maintain and tune. Contra Minsky and Webmind, in Novamente I've sought to create the simplest possible design that accounts for all the diverse phenomena of mind on an emergent level. Minsky is really trying to jam every aspect of the mind into his design on the explicit level.
Can you provide a quote from Minsky about this? That's certainly an interesting position to take. The entire field of cognitive psychology is intent on reducing the complexity of its own function so that it can be understood by itself.
On the other hand, Minsky's point is probably more one of evolutionary progress across the entire field, we should try many avenues and select those that work best, rather than getting locked into narrow visions of how the brain works as has happened repeatedly throughout the history of Psychology.
Re: Deb, his stuff is clearly an amazing accomplishment, although I think that his success is more of a technical than a deeply theoretical flavor.
On a more general note, I wouldn't expect to impress the AI community with just your theories and ideas. There are many AI frameworks out there, and it takes too much effort to understand new ones that come along until they do something amazing.
So you'll need a truly impressive demo to make a splash. Until you do that, every AI conference you go to will be like this one. Deb's learned this lesson and learned it well :)
-Brad
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