On Nov 13, 2007 2:37 PM, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Ben, > > Unfortunately what you say below is tangential to my point, which is > what happens when you reach the stage where you cannot allow any more > vagueness or subjective interpretation of the qualifiers, because you > have to force the system to do its own grounding, and hence its own > interpretation. I don't see why you talk about "forcing the system to do its own grounding" -- the probabilities in the system are grounded in the first place, as they are calculated based on experience. The system observes, records what it sees, abstracts from it, and chooses actions that it guess will fulfill its goals. Its goals are ultimately grounded in in-built feeling-evaluation routines, measuring stuff like "amount of novelty observed", "amount of food in system" etc. So, the system sees and then acts ... and the concepts it forms and uses are created/used based on their utility in deriving appropriate actions. There is no symbol-grounding problem except in the minds of people who are trying to interpret what the system does, and get confused. Any symbol used within the system, and any probability calculated by the system, are directly grounded in the system's experience. There is nothing vague about an observation like "Bob_Yifu was observed at time-stamp 599933322", or a fact "Command 'wiggle ear' was sent at time-stamp 544444". These perceptions and actions are the root of the probabilities the system calculated, and need no further grounding. > What you gave below was a sketch of some more elaborate 'qualifier' > mechanisms. But I described the process of generating more and more > elaborate qualifier mechanisms in the body of the essay, and said why > this process was of no help in resolving the issue. > So, if a system can achieve its goals based on choosing procedures that it thinks are likely to achieve its goals, based on the knowledge it gathered via its perceived experience -- why do you think it has a problem? I don't really understand your point, I guess. I thought I did -- I thought your point was that precisely specifying the nature of a conditional probability is a rats-nest of complexity. And my response was basically that in Novamente we don't need to do that, because we define conditional probabilities based on the system's own knowledge-base, i.e. Inheritance A B <.8> means "If A and B were reasoned about a lot, then A would (as measred by an weighted average) have 80% of the relationships that B does" But apparently you were making some other point, which I did not grok, sorry... Anyway, though, Novamente does NOT require logical relations of escalating precision and complexity to carry out reasoning, which is one thing you seemed to be assuming in your post. Ben ----- 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/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=64644318-8bbdee
