I should point out something amazing that has gone on here in all these
conversations re language & images.
No one seems to understand the basic semiotic fact that language has no
intrinsic reference or relation to the real world WHATSOEVER.
The linguistic sign bears NO RELATION WHATSOEVER to the signified.
There is nothing in "Tony Blair" - the letters/ word that bears any relation
to the person. You cannot extract any information about the signified (Tony
Blair) directly from language.
There is nothing in the word "cat" - the letters/ word that bears any
relation to the form of life referred to. You cannot extract any information
from that word about the thing referred to.
Symbols are ABSTRACT. Numbers included. Entirely abstract in relation to the
signified.
The only signs that bear relation to, and to some extent reflect, reality
and real things are graphics [maps/cartoons/geometry/ icons etc] and images
[photos, statues, detailed drawings, sound recordings etc.].
By extension if you wish to know what cats and dogs or opals and car wheels
have in common it is no damn use whatsoever looking at the words. You can
only draw further connections by looking at graphics and images of the
creatures or things - and it is only from those pictures that you can
observe whether they will fit into a chair, sit on a car seat, squeeze into
a door opening, fit into a pocket etc.
From graphics and images, you can extract a GREAT DEAL OF FURTHER
INFORMATION... - about the shape of the shoulders, ears, relation of ears
to mouth, expression, size of eyes in relation to face, size of animal in
relation to other animals etc. etc. and on and on.
A picture is not worth a thousand words, it is worth an INFINITY of words.
No amount of verbal description will ever tell you what someone looks like.
But an actual picture of the person will tell you in a second.
You all have the ILLUSION that words convey information, because your brain
automatically, normally unconsciously, makes sense of every word you
process, converting it into graphics and images to see if it does all make
sense. All your drawing of further connections between things - apparently
verbally - are actually dependent on your brain unconsciously literally
drawing those connections. When Mike D verbally explained that "an elephant
was a multiton quadruped that could not fit on a chair" he was only able to
do that, because his brain was unconsciously drawing the relevant pictures -
including pictures indicating what an elephant weighs and what a normal
chair will carry. The words alone tell you nothing.
There is no choice about all this. You do not have an option to have a pure
language AGI - if you wish any brain to understand the world, and draw
further connections about the world, it HAS to operate with graphics and
images. Period.
Plato's cave parable of how we are never looking at the real forms, but only
shadows on a cave wall is actually a parable of what it is like to operate
purely verbally. Plato was contemporaneous with the introduction of
alphabetic language - the first entirely abstract form of language. Before
that language was PICTOGRAPHIC - it was still connected with real images.
You guys are caught in a historical timewarp which is ending just about
now..
We have just entered the age of multimedia - and the printed word - still
entirely abstract - has just been replaced by the screened word - the word
on the computer screen. That word can increasingly be clicked to reveal a
picture of the real thing. The connection between words and images is being
restored. And it is an extraordinary time. Because you can only understand
what literally makes sense.
And the more and more pictures we have of things, the better we will
understand them. Pictures, once expensive and laborious, have suddenly
become very cheap, and are becoming ever cheaper.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bob Mottram" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, April 30, 2007 11:37 PM
Subject: Re: [agi] MONISTIC, CLOSED-ENDED AI VS PLURALISTIC, OPEN-ENDED AGI
On 30/04/07, Mike Dougherty <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
graphics, image, redrawn, visualizations - all indicative of a high
degree of visual-spatial thinking. I'm curious, are your own AGI
efforts are modelled on this mode of thought? I ask because I wonder
if the machine intelligence we build will "envision" concepts in an
analogous way to our own processes.
Visual imagery - the capacity to carry out visual mental
transformations - is a big aspect of what we do as humans, and there's
a lot of neural apparatus devoted to it. In its most basic form this
allows us to visually imagine objects, or ourselves or other people in
various situations. However, in a broad sense thinking is more of a
multi-modal process involving the entangling together of a rattle-bag
of information from various sensory modalities into a single conscious
percept. I think this is why philosophers are forever complaining
that computers will never appreciate "the blueness of blue", because
for a human the concept of "blueness" may include seemingly unrelated
sensory data or other miscellaneous concepts having little to do with
the specific wavelength of light hitting the retina.
It seems very likely to me that the processes involved with
interpreting visual information may also be hijacked and put to other
nefarious purposes, which have little to do with the purposes for
which they originally evolved. The processes used to transform visual
scenes could also be applied to more abstract concepts, and in my
estimation this is what artists, mathematicians, scientists, writers
and other creative thinkers do all the time.
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