Eric - Thanks to the pointer to your paper. Upon reading I quickly saw what I think provoked your reaction to my observation about understanding. We were actually saying much the same thing there. My point was that no human understands the world, because our understanding, as with all examples of intelligence that we know of, is domain-specific. I used the word context as synonymous with domain. My point was that not that humans don't *understand* the world, but that humans don't understand the *world*. I tried to make that clear in my follow-up, but it appears I lost your interest very early on. In reading your paper, I see that you seem to use the terms "world" and "domain" quite synonymously, but I'm sure you can appreciate that "domain" connotes a limitation of scope while "world" connotes expanded or ultimate scope. Our domain specific knowledge is of the world, but one cannot derive the world from our domain-specific knowledge since a great deal of information is lost in the compression process, and that really speaks to the core of what it means to "understand".
When I read in your paper "The claim is that the world has structure that can be exploited to rapidly solve problems which arise, and that underlying our thought processes are modules that accomplish this.", that rang a familiar bell for me. I can remember the intellectual excitement I felt when I first came across this idea back in the 1990s, probably from Gigerenzer, Kahneman & Tversky, Tooby & Cosmides or some combination of their thinking on fast and frugal heuristics and bounded rationality. You might have deduced my bias toward the domain-specific theory of (evolved) intelligence by my statement that the internal model must represent what seems to work, rather than what seems to be, in the environment. As I see it, the present key challenge of artificial intelligence is to develop a fast and frugal method of finding fast and frugal methods, in other words to develop an efficient time-bound algorithm for recognizing and compressing those regularities in "the world" faster than the original blind methods of natural evolution. - Jef > -----Original Message----- > From: Eric Baum [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Tuesday, November 07, 2006 1:44 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: RE: [agi] Natural versus formal AI interface languages > > > James and Jef, my appologies for misattributing the question. > > There is a phenomenon colloquially called "understanding" > that is displayed by people and at best rarely displayed > within limitted domains by extant computer programs. If you > want to have any hope of constructing an AGI, you are going > to have to come to grips with what it is and how it is > achieved. As to what I believe the answer is, I refer you to > the top (new) paper at http://whatisthought.com/eric.html > entitled "A Working Hypothesis for General Intelligence" > (and to my book What is Thought? if you want more background.) > > Eric Baum > http://whatisthought.com > > ----- > This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email > To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: > http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303 > ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
