Mike, Since you mentioned me and NARS, I feel the need to clarify my position on the related issues.
*. I agree with you that in many situations, the decision-making procedure doesn't follow predetermined algorithm, which give people the feeling of "free will". On the other hand, at a deeper level, each basic operations in the process does roughly follow a fixed routine, and how these operations form the decision-making procedure are determined by many factors at the moment. This mechanism is already implemented in NARS, and is discussed in detail in http://nars.wang.googlepages.com/wang.computation.pdf . Whether such a process is "free" or "determined" to a large extent depends on the context of the discussion: determined by whom? given what? The system does have a choice among options from time to time, though given the design and the experience of the system, these choices are not arbitrary at all. *. I disagree with you on the "two-tier structure", though it is indeed intuitively "obvious". As Ben said "On some topics, naive intuition can be misleading", which has been shown in many times in the history of AI and CogSci. The conscious/unconscious distinction does exist, but to me, it shows that our self-perception has its limits, just like our perception of the outside environment. I don't see your evidence for the two to be "separate", rather than just "different". What is your evidence for "The unconscious mind thinks more or less algorithmically"? To me, it is just the opposite --- to follow an algorithm needs conscious effort. If you are talking about automated behaviors or acquired skills, then that is a different issue from unconscious thinking. *. I also feel that you mixed several different issues all together in the discussion: free-will/determinism, conscious/unconscious, centralize/decentralize, which may be taken as "confused philosophical understanding" on your side. ;-) Pei On 5/6/07, Mike Tintner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Well, there obviously IS a conscious, executive mind, separate from the unconscious mind, whatever the enormous difficulties cognitive sicentists had in first admitting its existence and now in identifying its correlates! And you still seem to be sharing some of those old difficulties in talking about it. Science generally still has some of those difficulties too. They shouldn't be there. Social organizations have chief executives and appear more or less incapable of functioning without them. The individual organization that is a human being appears to need an executive mind for much the same reasons - though those reasons need defining. Note that Fodor acknowledges the embarrassing truth that sicence can currently offer no explanation of why the conscious mind exists - rational, deterministic computers and machines clearly do not have or need one, functioning perfectly as entirely unconscious affairs. One immediate reason, applicable to AGI - although it will take the next Cognitive Revolution to recognize this - is that the two minds, almost certainly, think very differently. The unconscious mind thinks more or less algorithmically, (at least most of the time), rapidly in set ways - like a rational computer - it has to. Its function is to get things done. The conscious mind thinks literally, freely. How long it will spend on any given decision, and what course of thought it will pursue in reaching that decision are definitely NOT set, but free. (How does Pei's NARS fit in here?) Should I buy the marshmallow or the creme caramel ice cream? Hmm that's a tough one. I want to get this right... And I could and will resolve that decision in a few more seconds OR at other times, I could still be here thinking about it several minutes later OR at other times I could wander off in mid-thought to another subject entirely. No computer currently thinks like this - thinks freely and "crazily" as opposed to rationally and deterministically. Anyone who produces one - that has a similar practicality to the animal/human executive mind - will literally usher in the next Cognitive Revolution. You guys are clearly moving that way - but still appear to have a somewhat confused philosophical understanding of why all this is really necessary. (One interesting, but tangential issue is that the unconscious mind does appear to have a certain freedom too - it's hard to see dreams, for example, as deterministic affairs, Well, your dreams maybe, but not mine, you understand...).
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