Yes, Lojban is "just another human-created ontology." My statement
was that it is a particularly good one, well-thought out, practical,
and conceptually sensible.
I note that, unlike what you say, Novamente is not predicated on the
assumption that "we should acquire all knowledge via experiential
learning." Rather, it is predicated on the assumption that "there is
a lot of knowledge, necessary for AGI, that is only practicably
acquirable via experiential learning." I think there is also a lot
of knowledge that can practicably be explicitly encoded and fed
directly into an AGI's mind -- I just think the knowledge in this
latter category is not **sufficient** in itself.... So, we can take
a hybrid approach in Novamente.
-- Ben G
On Jan 25, 2007, at 6:58 PM, YKY (Yan King Yin) wrote:
On 1/25/07, Ben Goertzel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> If there is a major problem with Cyc, it is not the choice of basic
> KR language. Predicate logic is precise and relatively simple.
I agree mostly, though I think even Cyc's simple predicate logic
language can be made even simpler and better. For example, Cyc
uses the classical quantifiers #$forAll and #$exists. In my
version I don't use Frege-style quantifiers but I allow generalized
modifiers like "many", "a few", in addition to "all", "exists".
> Rather, the main problem is the impracticality of encoding a decent
> percentage of the needed commonsense knowledge!
Now I see why we disagree here. You believe we should acquire all
knowledge via experiential learning. IMO we can do even better
than the experiential route. We can let the internet "crowd" enter
the commonsense corpus for us. This should be allow us to reach a
functioning, usable AGI sooner.
> And, on a more technical level, I think that Cyc's **ontology** is
> too complex and unwieldy. This is NOT an issue of the KR language,
> but rather of the chosen vocabulary of "semantic primitives". I
> don't feel that Cyc has a well-thought-out set of semantic
> primitives. They have a small number of basic logical primitives,
> and then a HUGE number of complex abstract concepts in their upper
> ontology. IMO an intermediate level is needed, involving a few
dozen
> well thought out semantic primitives, and a few hundred additional
> basic semantic relationships.
I have a similar sense. As wikipedia puts it, Cyc has been
criticized for "excessive reification". I think the problem is
that Cyc creates artificial labels that are atomic and *non-
compositional*. For example the label "#$rawFood" should be
represented *compositionally* by the concepts "raw" and "food".
I suggest not to use ontologies at all. John Sowa has spent lots
of time on the ontology problem and his conclusion is: "We will
never have a one-size fits all ontology for anything having to do
with computer systems. Case closed" [ http://suo.ieee.org/email/
msg12861.html ]. Perhaps this is one GOFAI feature we need to ditch.
I think we can work bottom-up from a vast web of commonsense
pixels, and the computer organize its own knowledgebase via
clustering etc. So we don't need any man-made ontology.
> Lojban IMO has done a great job of this. The Lojban language
> embodies a very well thought out commonsense ontology, which has
been
> shaped evolutionarily thru the usage of the language by the Lojban
> community.
Not familiar with the Lojban community or the status of the
language, so I can't comment. I still believe that introducing
Lojban into AGI is spurious / redundant and it may alienate people
from your projects if they don't know Lojban. It seems like just
another man-made ontology that has its inadequacies.
> However, this still doesn't solve the problem that there is too much
> commonsense knowledge to code-in explicitly ... so it has to be
> learned...
This is the main disagreement. Could an internet crowd codify all
commonsense knowledge? It seems yes, especially if we're talking
about the more *verbal* portion of commonsense. Perhaps we should
combine the Codifiy strategy with the Experiential Learning
strategy....
YKY
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
