----- Original Message ----- From: "Eric Baum" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, March 16, 2007 6:02 AM Subject: Re: [agi] Logical representation
> I would also argue that other > animals think pretty effectively-- but maybe they use internally > pidgin English as you think we do. I don't think animals or all humans use pidgin English internally but I think that all humans use some kind of language or abbreviations thereof for communicating between higher level thinking models. I am not overly concerned exactly how humans achieve cognition as the tools available to evolution and biological humans is totally different than implementing an AGI using present day computers. I will get your book as I can see you have many incites into the topic of cognition in humans but ultimately a computer solution will have to be programmed to create an AGI IMHO. > My book > What is Thought? studies how this picture extends more generally to > thought. It explains how understanding, semantics, language etc > arises from a generalized version of Occam's razor, in which if you > find a compact enough program behaving well enough on enough data, > it is so constrained as to exploit underlying structure and generalize > to solve new problems. The Occam program is argued to be primarily > located in the genome. The book surveys and extends a computer science > literature exploring these kinds of ideas, as well as data and ideas > from a number of other fields. I know that Occam's razor is an observation that given 2 theories that explain a set of facts, the simplest one is probably correct. This observation is not a law or even correct in all cases. I however, much prefer simple over complex in general so I don't totally disagree with finding smaller and simpler solutions. Calling a single program an "Occam program" seems a little strange. I have seen no evidence that our intelligence comes from a single algorithm or source. I can conceive that evolution could just as easily have created algorithms that were very convoluted and very "non Occam" but because they work "good enough", there was no pressure by evolution/selection to create anything better. As we both know, evolution has no goal or direction as such. I am not convinced that evolution/selection cares much about the size, complexity or eligance of any solution it might stumble upon. > According to my theory, "Spontaneous intelligence" is a miasma because > finding Occam code is a hard computational problem. Our intelligence > emerged through an astoundingly huge evolutionary program. When I am > taught a new concept, say by you, I have to build new code. Your code is not > identical to mine, so it would be a hard problem for you to reach > in and simply supply code-- even if you could you'd have to interface > it with my code. Instead, you provide through language, program > sketches and examples of subconcepts so that I can build the code > very rapidly. And in fact, I build it remarkably rapidly-- learning > is incredibly fast if you consider the complexity of the problem. > (If you had to reach in and specify synapse values and connections, > good luck, it would take you a lot longer to teach me mathematics > so that I understood it and could go out and prove new theorems! ;^) I rarely am stumped for the definition of a word but "miasma", I had to look up. It's meaning "A harmful or corrupting atmosphere or influence; also, an atmosphere that obscures" has very interesting implications! My remark about putting concepts directly into a persons head wasn't to suggest this was a good thing for people. I was using this to show that direct coding of some concepts into an AGI is a good thing. This would be impossible if all internal data was represented in non human readable form as some have suggested on this list. The success of HTML, XML, Unix config files etc can be directly linked to their being stored in standard ASCII text. This makes it easy to inspect and change diverse formats using a stan dard text editor even if a specialized binary format may be more computer efficient. From these observations I believe that some hand coding of models and a plain ASCII set of internal interfaces will be the most useful way of pursuing AGI. Thank you for your comments. -- David Clark ----- 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
