Sounds a little confusing. Sounds like you plan to evolve a system through
testing "thousands of candidate mechanisms." So one way or another you too
are taking a view - even if it's an evolutionary, "I'm not taking a view"
view - on, and making a lot of asssumptions about
-how systems evolve
-the "known architecture of human cognition."
about which science has extremely patchy and confused knowledge. I don't see
how any system-builder can avoid taking a view of some kind on such matters,
yet you seem to be criticising Ben for so doing.
I was hoping that you also had some view on how a system 's symbols should
be grounded, especially since you mention Harnad, who does make vague
gestures towards the brain's levels of grounding. But you don't indicate any
such view.
Sounds like you too, pace MW, are hoping for a number of miracles - IOW
creative ideas - to emerge, and make your system work.
Anyway, you have to give Ben credit for putting a lot of his stuff &
principles out there & on the line. I think anyone who wants to mount a
full-scale assault on him (& why not?) should be prepared to reciprocate.
-
RL:
Mike Tintner wrote:
RL:In order to completely ground the system, you need to let the system
build its own symbols
V. much agree with your whole argument. But - & I may well have missed
some vital posts - I have yet to get the slightest inkling of how you
yourself propose to do this.
Well, for the purposes of the present discussion I do not need to say how,
only to say that there is a difference between two different research
strategies for finding out what the mechanism is that does this.
One strategy (the one that I claim has serious problems) is where you try
to have your cake and eat it too: let the system build its own symbols,
with attached parameters that 'mean' whatever they end up meaning after
the symbols have been built, BUT then at the same time insist that some of
the parameters really do 'mean' things like probabilities or likelihood or
confidence values. If the programmer does anything at all to include
mechanisms that rely on these meanings (these interpretations of what the
parameters signify) then the programmer has second-guessed what the system
itself was going to use those things for, and you have a conflict between
the two.
My strategy is to keep my hands off, not do anything to strictly interpret
those parameters, and experimentally observe the properties of systems
that seem loosely consistent with the known architecture of human
cognition.
I have a parameter, for instance, that seems to be a "happiness" or
"consistency" parameter attached to a knowledge-atom. But beyond roughly
characterising it as such, I do not insert any mechanisms that (implicitly
or explicitly) lock the system into such an intepretation. Instead, I have
a wide variety of different candidate mechanisms that use that parameter,
and I look at the overall properties of systems that use these different
candidate mechanisms. I let the system use the parameter according to the
dictates of whatever mechanism is in place, but then I just explore the
consequences (the high level behavior of the system).
In this way I do not get a conflict between what I think the parameter
'ought' to mean and what the system is implicitly taking it to 'mean' by
its use of the parameter.
I could start talking about all the different candidate mechanisms, but
there are thousands of them (at least thousands of candidates that I go so
far as to test: they are generated in a semi-automatic way, so there are
an unlimited number of potential candidates).
Richard Loosemore
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