Well, hardware & software
development is going pretty fast in this direction due to the video
game and movie-viewing market,
so I have every expectation that within 5-10 years, commodity hardware will be
DAMN powerful at video manipulation... which will be a real boon to this kind
of AI ...
Right now, even, you can get very nice rack-mounted NVidia GPU's that
can do a lot
of image and video processing really fast ...
ben
On Feb 16, 2008 10:48 AM, Mike Tintner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Ben,
>
> Yes I'm making the strong claim re consciousness/thought are movies-based.
> Yes, I don't begin to try and explain it re programs - I will do a bit more
> towards that soon - I just wanted to give first a sense how it could be
> possible, and I hope you agree that that is/has been v. difficult to even
> give a sense of. What I would suggest - simply by way of opening your mind
> is: think long and hard about why the brain only dreams in movies. That is
> such an important fact. (I think it's fairly generally agreed that some
> kind of important reprocessing and reorganizing of past experiences, as well
> as preparation for future experiences, is going on). It would, you might
> think, be so much more efficient to think in just words or other symbols as
> we do consciously for such long periods.
>
> Also - and I have just begun to think about this - we understand those
> photos, I believe - by "animating" them unconsciously - animating the
> objects and people in the scene.
>
> And if that's true, (which is presumably experimentally testable), then a)
> we can do it for anything, (as in - every language sentence may be
> unconsciously processed as a movie scene - and actually, I believe, is ),
> and b) I'm suggesting we *have* to do it. Difficult as it is for us, still
> in general largely movemaking-undeducated, (though that will change v.
> shortly), to believe, you can't understand or think about the world at all
> if you can't run movies of it.
>
> P.S. My v. broad suggestion re the computer hardware/program aspect of all
> this is simply this: the only way, v. broadly, that our brain can achieve
> the things I'm claiming, is by being a true *image processor*, by being able
> to a) overlay and compare images whole, and b) manipulate them with
> something like the freedom of a sculptor/artist and movie editor. I've no
> real idea whether digital processors might not be rethought to achieve that,
> or whether it will require an add-on analog processor or something else
> entirely. And I wish people would start having ideas about this side of
> things - one person here actually did respond positively (offline) to my
> math test, and was stimulated to start thinking in hardware terms how a
> computer might doodle (presumably, although I can't remember) without
> coordinates.
>
> P.P.S. Bear in mind that we have just (almost literally this year) entered
> the age of "interactive video" - as well as interactive media generally -
> and that is an even more important and culturally earthshaking development
> than that of the printed book from the manuscript. (Interactive video is
> still almost literally BTW in its birth pangs. It will become vastly more
> sophisticated).
>
>
>
> > Mike,
> >
> > It is well recognized that as well as declarative and procedural
> > memory, the human
> > brain contains a substantial "episodic memory" aspect, which stores some
> > sort of
> > abstracted "movies" of a mind's history. Clearly, matching of
> > abstracted-movie-subsets against
> > others is important, and variation manipulation processes on these
> > abstracted-movie-subsets
> >
> > And clearly, humans possess the ability to use this component
> > metaphorically
> > and imaginatively, beyond our actual experience.
> >
> > That much is well-recognized among pretty all cognitive psychologists
> >
> > What you're claiming seems to be that
> >
> > 1)
> > In the human brain, this episodic/visual faculty
> > is not just one component among many important ones,
> > but rather the most central component, which needs to be understood in
> > order for the others
> > to make any sense. This is a stronger claim which I don't really agree
> > with.
> >
> > 2)
> > AGI's need to emulate the human brain in including internal visual
> > episodic memory and associated abstracted manipulations in a critical
> > role. This I am almost certain is wrong.
> >
> > Then you go on to allude that
> >
> > 3)
> > Somehow all this episodic, visual processing cannot be done by
> > "programs." Here you totally lose me.
> >
> >
> > Regarding why the visual/episodic component of cognition has received
> > relatively little attention in the AI field, I guess there are two
> > main reasons, neither of which are that people find this aspect
> > uninteresting;
> >
> > 1)
> > Computer vision, which is an extremely active area, has not yet
> > succeeded fully enough to let us really successfully abstract visual
> > forms from images, in the context of real-world data
> >
> > For instance, identifying the objects in a complex visual scene
> > remains a hard problem for computer vision system.
> >
> > There is loads of research $$ going into this, though, far more than
> > into AGI, so it's hardly a neglected area
> >
> > 2)
> > Manipulating and storing large databases of movies is expensive and
> > irritating using current technology
> >
> > I would guess that as hard drive and processor become cheaper, we will
> > see more experimentation with the episodic/visual aspects of
> > intelligence in AI and AGI.
> >
> >
> > -- Ben G
> >
> > On Feb 16, 2008 12:20 AM, Mike Tintner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> Ed & 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 | Archives | Modify Your Subscription
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Ben Goertzel, PhD
> > CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC
> > Director of Research, SIAI
> > [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >
> > "If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they
> > will surely become worms."
> > -- Henry Miller
> >
> > -------------------------------------------
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> > 7:08 PM
>
> >
> >
>
>
> -------------------------------------------
> agi
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--
Ben Goertzel, PhD
CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC
Director of Research, SIAI
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they
will surely become worms."
-- Henry Miller
-------------------------------------------
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