RE: [agi] A 1st Step To Using Your Image-inationEd & Co, Rather than answer
your objections directly, I propose to :
1) In this post, demonstrate that visual reasoning while still regarded by our
culture generally (& not just AI/AGI) as a minimal and peripheral part of our
thinking actually plays a massive and fairly continuous part in our life - & we
are extremely unaware of it
2) In an accompanying post, not only provide some more dramatic examples of
visual reasoning, but provide proof that visual processing cannot be handled by
symbolic processing (or not to any serious, practical extent)
If you still object not unreasonably, given current attitudes, that this is all
peripheral to AGI, I will then in a day or two:
3) demonstrate that all this lies at the dead centre of AGI and most, if not
all of its unsolved problems..
{Please start downloading this file:
http://www.mediafire.com/?2wxyn5rjdyq
Don't open yet, but if it doesn't work, post immediately!!- the rest is
pointless without it]
I think we can agree that our culture regards visual reasoning as a pretty
peripheral part of thinking generally and our life. For example, it is fairly
standard in psychology textbooks to ask whether thinking and language are not
identical/interdependent. The main point here is that while people know we
don't only think in language (and symbols), they have a generally hard time
talking about other forms of thinking, or instancing them in any detail. Even
I, who have enormous sympathy with my own opinions, have had a hard time
explaining the importance of visual and common sense (literally
all-the-senses-together) thinking - and didn't even realise till a recent
exchange with Pei, how massively important observation-as-reasoning, (incl.
visual reasoning) is.
It is not uncommon for even a highly educated psychologist to say something
like: "I only think in language; I never think in visuals."
So I would like you to engage in some visual reasoning - and I think you'll
find that you won't be able to help it - it happens automatically.
I'd like you in a minute to look at the slideshow of visuals in that file., and
as you do,observe yourself as best you can. What I think you'll find is that
you don't look at any photo as a "shot" but rather as a "scene" - a story in
pictures - with a before and after. And it's quite remarkable how much you do
infer about each photo - how you can and do:
-predict to some extent what subjects are likely to do next
-detect what subjects may have done just before
-identify where the scene is taking place
and could, if asked, fill in a whole story around the photos.
Please look at the whole file now....!!
And when you've looked, you might start asking yourself more detailed questions
about how you came to work out all you did about those photos.
How do you know where people and animals are likely to move, objects are likely
to move/splash, whether a figure is threatening to reach or actually reaching
for his gun, considering shooting or about to shoot a rifle, what those girls
on the sofa are trying to do, what those four feet mean, what that man by the
sea is looking at and even what mood he might be in, how that woman dancing is
talking to the man and how he is reacting, why that lovers' embrace is
particularly hot, why that man is a drunk,how a child or the cat will play that
piano and even react and what noises she may make, what those people in the
dark are looking at, and so on ...?
One thing's for sure: you are doing a lot of visual reasoning.
And in fact, you are doing visual reasoning all day long - reasoning -
composing stories-in-pictures about what has just happened and is about to
happen in front of you - where objects are going to move, or how they've just
moved, (fallen on the floor), how the people around you are about to move, how
fast they will approach you and whether that car might hit you, what their
expressions mean, and whether they are likely to be friendly or come on or be
angry, and how fast that blood may coagulate, whether that light indicates
someone is in a room, whether the clouds indicate rain, whether those people
are grouping together in friendship or to fight, whether that shop attendant is
going to take too long etc etc.
And all day long you are in effect doing tacit physics, chemistry, biology,
psychology, sociology about the world around you. But almost none of it
involves formal reasoning that any of those disciplines could explain. They
couldn't begin to tell you for example how you work out visually how things and
animals and people are likely to behave - how you read the emotional
complexities of a face - how someone is straining that smile too hard. There
are no formulae that can tell you just by looking whether that suitcase is
likely to be too heavy.
All of this is visual and common-sense reasoning, most of which you'd be v.
hard put to explain verbally let alone mathematically or logically .
And that's why you were that wonderful little scientist of legend as an infant,
pre-verbally exploring all the physical qualiities and nature of the world,
conducting all those physical experiments with objects and people - very
largely without words. And actually you've never stopped being a tacit
scientist.
For the moment, all I want you to retain is that we are all doing a massive
amount of tacit, visual, commonsense reasoning which we are, blithely unaware
of..
The supreme example of our blind prejudice here is our idea that thinking is
primarily a medium of language. Seems obvious. And yet, if you stop to think
about it, there is only one form of thinking that never stops from the moment
you wake till the moment you go to sleep, and that is the movie-in-the round
that is your consciousness. It never stops. Verbal thinking stops. The movie
goes on and on with you continually visually working out what is going on or
about to go on "behind the scenes." And when your unconscious brain wants to
think,it always, always thinks in movies never in just words. Movies are the
basic medium of thought - not just pictures, still pictures - but continuous
rolling movies, involving all the senses simultaneously. That's how you
interpreted those photos - as slices-of- , stills-from-a-movie - and NOT just
as pure photos.
I merely want to suggest here - and not really argue - that all that visual
reasoning is indeed truly visual - that we actually process all those photos
and visuals as *whole images* and *whole image sequences* against similar
images/sequences stored in memory, and that we couldn't possibly process them
as just symbols. In the next post, I will zero in on a simple proof.
P.S. I am not "attacking symbols" - I am attacking the idea that we or an AGI
can think in symbols exclusively, and that includes thinking in
images-as-symbolic-formulae. I believe that we think - and so must an AGI - in
symbols-AND- graphics/schemas-AND detailed images - simultaneously,
interdependently - that we are the greatest movie on earth with
words/symbols-AND-pictures.
-------------------------------------------
agi
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