----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard Loosemore" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <agi@v2.listbox.com>
Sent: Saturday, May 05, 2007 3:21 PM
Subject: Re: [agi] The Picture Tree
Mike,
Thanks for the thoughtful and detailed reply.
I'm going to have to be brief because of time pressure, alas.
My overall feeling is that there is an important nugget of truth beneath
the surface of what you say, but I think that when you develop the idea
further, you might find yourself drifting away from the strict use of the
"picture" idea (which seems very important to your position right now, but
I think you might end up lessening its importance later), and move the
concept towards a "representations" or "mental models" idea instead.
"PICTURE" is v. important & v. deliberately chosen to force you, the reader,
to realise that you cannot understand that which you cannot "see" or
literally "make sense of". I THINK YOU SHOULD BEAR IN MIND WHEN CONSIDERING
THESE IDEAS THAT THE RESISTANCE TO THE IMPORTANCE OF IMAGES IS SIMPLY
ENORMOUS. THE LITERATE MIND BELIEVES THAT THOUGHT AND RATIONALITY ARE
LARGELY A MATTER OF THE 3 R'S - OF USING LANGUAGE PLUS MATHS/
NUMBERS/ALGEBRA - AND IMAGES OF ALL KINDS ARE AN EXTRA. THE SERIOUS THINKING
AND REPRESENTATION GETS DONE SYMBOLICALLY.
EVERYWHERE IN OUR CULTURE BATTLES ARE CURRENTLY RAGING BETWEEN THE LITERATE
AND THE COMING MULTIMEDIATE MIND - BETWEEN, FOR EXAMPLE, SYMBOLIC AI AND
EMBODIED, SITUATED ROBOTICS, BETWEEN RATIONAL, COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND
EMBODIED COGNITION, RATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND EMBODIED PHILOSOPHY.
THE IMAGERY DEBATE IS ONE MORE EXAMPLE OF THAT BATTLE.
THE LITERATE MENTALITY WILL SIMPLY BE SWEPT AWAY WITHIN THE NEXT DECADE.
IT'S A NONSENSE.
NOTE: IT'S NOT A MATTER HERE OF EITHER/OR - OF GRAPHICS AND IMAGES, FOR
EXAMPLE, BEING MORE IMPORTANT THAN SYMBOLS - THAT WOULD BE A NONSENSE TOO.
THE BRAIN AND OUR ENTIRE CULTURE, I AM SUGGESTING, ARE AN INTERDEPENDENT
PICTURE TREE. YOU CAN NO MORE HAVE ABSTRACT WITHOUT CONCRETE, OR VICE VERSA,
THAN YOU CAN HAVE GENERALISATIONS WITHOUT PARTICULARISATIONS - IF YOU ARE TO
UNDERSTAND THE WORLD, AND REPRESENTATIONS OF THE WORLD.
The reason I say this is that you need a very abstract notion of "picture"
to get some aspects of the idea to work. For example, when you say:
> How does the brain know that:
>
> "The man climbed the penny "
>
> is nonsense? Because it will literally draw a picture in graphics of a
> man trying to climb a penny - and from the graphics deduce that
> that is impossible.
... can you really say that it is the *graphic* that determines the
impossibility? Is it the iumpossibiility of the attempt to draw that
graphic, that leads to the "impossible" verdict? Now that doesn't seem
quite right, because I can draw at least two images of a person climbing a
penny, both of which work, in a way (even though they are peculiar).
I THINK THAT WAS MY POINT. THE ATTEMPT TO DRAW A MAN CLIMBING A PENNY WILL
PRODUCE A) "IT'S IMPOSSIBLE, IF IT'S A NORMAL PENNY" AND B) BUT IT MIGHT BE
AN OUTSIZE PENNY.
THE EXACT DETAILS OF HOW THE BRAIN MIGHT PROCEED TO DRAW THE SCENE HERE ARE
OBVIOUSLY OPEN TO DEBATE . IT MIGHT ONLY NEED TO START PUTTING A MAN BESIDE
A PENNY TO SEE THE IMPOSSIBILITY AND NOT LITERALLY NEED TO GO TO THE TROUBLE
OF DRAWING THE "CLIMBING." ON THE OTHER HAND, (THINKING ABOUT IT), BETTER
SAFE THAN SORRY. WHY NOT DRAW THE WHOLE SCENE? THE BRAIN CERTAINLY HAS THE
CAPACITY TO DO THIS AND MANY VASTLY MORE ARDUOUS VISUAL TASKS ON THE FLY.
What I am trying to get at is that what sounds more plausible is that the
person builds some kind of mental model of the situation, and the
components of this model are well-connected enough that *their* attempts
to form a coherent structure tells the rest of the brain that something is
not quite right with the sentence. Do those mental model components make
something that should be described as an image, or a picture? I am not so
sure: they really do not have to go all the way down to an internal
canvas on which lines are positioned (simply no need for them to get that
specific: they can do their job without the lines), so perhaps it would
not be right to call them a 'picture'.
WHY DON'T YOU SPELL OUT OR DRAW OUT WHAT YOU MEAN BY THIS MENTAL MODEL
BUSINESS? I CAN'T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEAN - BECAUSE, AS PER MY THEORY, I
LITERALLY CAN'T "SEE" WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT. AND I SUSPECT THAT IF WE
DID A SURVEY OTHERS WOULD SIMILARLY HAVE DIFFICULTY UNDERSTANDING YOUR
SUGGESTIONS.
(YOU UNDERSTAND HERE, I HOPE, THAT I'M NOT IN ANY WAY TRYING TO GET AT YOU,
BUT MERELY TO REINFORCE MY THEORY!).
The way I am pushing your idea is in the direction of a cluster of ideas
that are common to the work of me, and people like Phil Johnson-Laird (his
book Mental Models was about how people build models when trying to do
reasoning tasks, among other things) and Doug Hofstadter (especially see
his cute little paper called "Jumbo" which is in the Fluid Analogies
book).
These ideas are also closely related to many very general ideas about
internal representation: you could stretch them to cover Goertzel's work,
and probably everyone else building a system on this list! The idea that
a mental representation is built, then tested in some way to make
deductions about the outside world, is a very common one.
What is interesting about your idea is a subtle background hint of
simultaneous constraint satisfaction (common to Hofstadter, me, many
people in the "parallel distributed processing" school of thought, etc).
That part I like.
Be good if you could write your ideas up in essay form.
[Be good if you could do that yourself Loosemore. Okay, okay. ;-) ]
Richard Loosemore.
Mike Tintner wrote:
Richard,
My apologies for coming on too strong.
Re psychosemiotics, if there were such a science, yes, it would probably
come under cognitive psychology. Is there a need for such a science? Yes.
See my "picture theory" below. But regardless of that, there is an
obvious need to look at human sign systems and media as a totality, what
they reflect about the brain's and human system's needs to apprehend the
world, how they change the human nervous system, and how they will evolve
in future - human sign systems are manifestly continuously evolving. It
should be obvious that such a science would fit in a timely way with the
new multimedia age and the new multimedia (as opposed to literate)
mentality (but I can expand on that another time).
Re Kosslyn, etc, I presume what you are really after is: what am I
personally saying, if anything, that is different from Kosslyn etc and/or
of any interest? Well, I am saying something v. different, and if
nothing else, it serves to place the imagery debate in context.
(Thanks BTW for all the links - which I found stimulating).
What my "picture tree" theory - to put it EXTREMELY briefly - says is :
the brain continually tries to process all incoming info. on at least 3
levels of abstractness/ concreteness simultaneously - as:
*symbols - totally abstract, non-referential signs like words and numbers
*graphics - which are principally the OUTLINES of objects - exemplified
by children's drawings, icons, cartoons, maps, et
*images - which, as I use the word, are more detailed representations of
objects - exemplified by photos, realistic drawings, paintings, statues -
but also involve all sensory forms not just visual
(obviously there is a difference between the brain's internal picture
tree, with its internal symbols, graphics & images, and the external
cultural forms of them).
The brain literally tries to "make sense" of all incoming info. - the
primary object being to test the truth of all info.
So when the brain reads words, it continually tries to convert them into
graphics and images - although much or all of this last activity may be
taking place UNCONSCIOUSLY.
How does the brain know that:
"The man climbed the penny "
is nonsense? Because it will literally draw a picture in graphics of a
man trying to climb a penny - and from the graphics deduce that that is
impossible - although it will also be able to say in some instances:
"well, maybe if it were a specially built outsize penny"... and the way
it will arrive at that is by graphically drawing an outsize penny, and
concluding from both graphics and images, that that is a physical though
unusual possibility.
The brain's graphics are principally dynamic, metamorphic (flexible
shape) graphics - not so much still graphics. The brain then I am
suggesting is continually drawing composite, dynamic graphic pictures to
make sense of sentences, and, where relevant, testing them against the
still more detailed images of its actual experience. (Remember that the
prime form that our sensory images of the world take are moving "VIDEOS"
not still images - you can see why I find Hawkins interesting).
What is distinctive, and unquestionably important about this theory, is
that it introduces a new category of signs. Both semiotics and the
traditional psychological/philosophical debates divide signs into two :
symbols vs icons or images. I'm pointing out what is obvious - that
"graphics" should be treated separately, and form an important separate
category of sign systems.
What's also distinctive about it is that it connects up how the brain
works with the great many different external sign systems that humans
have produced and use - there has to be value in that.
The imagery debate is v. different to all this - it's about in what form
images are laid down in the brain, and what happens when we consciously
form mental images, and imagine composite scenes and scenarios.
There is an obvious longstanding philosophical debate that forms a
background to the imagery debate, about whether symbols are grounded in
images, but it's all very general.
What I'm proposing is an overall, far more comprehensive theory of how
the brain continuously processes information - the brain's "picture
tree". And it has major consequences and applications. For example,
putting this v. simplistically, it says that those subjects which humans
find most difficult to understand and confusing, are precisely those
subjects like quantum mechanics, philosophy, or genetics which are most
abstract and literally "do not make sense" as presented - are not
adequately illustrated.
The theory also has applications to AGI - if it's correct, it's saying
that the central source of human adaptivity is the use of graphics
(backed by images). It's mainly although by no means exclusively graphics
that enable the human brain to connect just about anything to anything
else. (Plato said "Let no one without geometry enter here" - I'm
suggesting that "no one without graphics" (of which geometry is only one
form) can enter AGI). How can the brain think of a virtual infinity of
ways to "move" a given object? Probably because it first draws "move" as
something like a moving arrow. And then it can metamorphically convert
that arrow into, and associate it with, an infinite variety of more
detailed graphic forms of movement like "hammer", "poke", "shovel",
"nail", etc. etc. ad infinitum.
(In case you are interested, a couple of points about the imagery debate
from a brief reading:
*propositions - a still graphic may not be, but a MOVING graphic or image
IS a proposition - it says, for example, this object is moving here - the
cat is sitting on the mat - has anyone pointed this out?
*storing info - the whole nodes thing strikes me as v. unlikely; I
would argue that a graphic or image is a supremely more efficient way to
store info. - a standard map, for example, does not just contain info.
say about how four or five towns are geographically related to each
other, it tells you how every single point on that map is related to
every other point - it enables the planning of a virtual infinity of
journeys - I don't see how that info can be represented symbolically/
formulaically - do you? Ditto, an image of a face enables you to compare
every part of that face to every other part - I don't see how all those
comparisons can be contained in symbolic form.
*homunculus - I find the fear re a homunculus weird for this reason -
every image CONTAINS the viewer - when you look at a photo of a chair or
a mountain, that photo doesn't just show you the chair, it tells you how
far you the viewer are from it, and at what angle you are looking at it -
has this point been made? (Consciousness in other words is an "itheatre"
in which every sensory image is framed by the self viewing or sensing
it).
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