Richard> Eric Baum wrote: >> Richard> Every step of the following argument begs questions and lacks Richard> force: >> If you want a more complete argument, read the book. One of the >> reasons for writing a book is not to have to engage in arguments >> piecemeal. >> >> Eric
Richard> I read your paper. Richard> I am not sure how I would be helped by a "more complete" Richard> version of an argument that already appears to be so severely Richard> broken. Richard> As I see it, the root cause of the trouble (in your paper, in Richard> the literature behind that paper, and in the sequence of Richard> arguments you summarized) is that some people have been so Richard> obsessed with the idea of turning concepts like Richard> "understanding" and "intelligence" into precisely formulated Richard> concepts, amenable to mathematical proofs, that they are Richard> willing to redefine and distort the meanings of those words Richard> in order to strait-jacket them into the form they desire. In Richard> this manner, you quote the COLT literature as having shown Richard> that understanding is, essentially, compression. My apologies for creating this misconception in your mind. The COLT literature in no way claims that understanding is equivalent to compression. It does not discuss understanding. The COLT literature more or less proved that generalization in various contexts is equivalent to finding hypotheses from simple classes. Incidentally, these classes may or may not be viewed as compression, one alternative criterion is finite VC-dimension (see chapter 4 of WIT? for more details). There are also Bayesian viewpoints etc. But in any case, these mathematical results mostly apply to prediction of concepts, eg you see a series of pictures of chairs and not-chairs, and desire to predict whether a new picture contains a chair or not. The extrapolation to an explanation of understanding is mine, so I bear whatever blame you may wish to assign. This is where the distinction between exploiting structure and simply finding a compact representation comes in. I am no longer talking merely about finding a compact representation of some data, I am extrapolating to a compact program that solves a variety of naturally presented problems. It also is where mathematical proofs go out. I would hope reading the book would give you a better appreciation for why I think understanding comes from finding an Occam code. I believe my book presents a straightforward explanation of what understanding is and how it arises, that is consistent with all data of which I'm aware, and which is very natural in the context of the COLT results regarding concept generalization. I'm not aware of any other theory of understanding that meets these standards. Richard> It is rather like taking the concept of "happiness" and Richard> redefining it as "Happiness = A Warm Puppy". By doing this, Richard> all of a sudden we have ways to measure happiness by Richard> constructing a puppy density function, and we can further Richard> refine it by measuring the temperature of the puppies, and Richard> rating different puppies according their degree of puppiness. Richard> This is great: we took the vague term "happiness" and Richard> formalized it so nicely that now we can do math on the Richard> happiness density field. Huge amounts of rigorous math can Richard> follow from this, including precise - and very comforting - Richard> proofs about the properties of this new "happiness". Richard> Trouble is, its all BS. Not because the math is wrong (the Richard> math is great!), but because the initial distortion of the Richard> commonplace term was such an egregious distortion. Richard> So it is with redefinitions of the term "understanding" to be Richard> synonymous with a variety of compression. This is an Richard> egregious distortion of the real meaning of the term, and Richard> *everything* that follows from that distortion is just Richard> nonsense. Richard> Richard Loosemore. Richard> Richard Loosemore Richard> ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: Richard> http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your Richard> options, please go to: Richard> 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
