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.
The AI magazine paper is on-line available at "The St. Thomas common sense symposium: designing architectures for human-level intelligence" (http://web.media.mit.edu/~push/StThomas-AIMag.pdf)
Pei
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