I believe I offered the beginning of a v. useful way to conceive of this
whole area in an earlier post.
The key concept is "inventory of the world."
First of all, what is actually being talked about here is only a
VERBAL/SYMBOLIC KB.
One of the grand illusions of a literature culture is that words/symbols
refer to everything. The reality is that we have a v. limited verbal
inventory of the world. Words do not describe most parts of your body, for
example, only certain key divisions. Check over your hand for a start and
see how many bits you can name - minute bit by bit. When it comes to the
movements of objects, our vocabulary is breathtakingly limited.
In fact, our verbal/symbolic inventory of the world (as provided for by our
existing cultural vocabulary - for all its millions of words) is, I suggest,
only a tiny fraction of our COMMON SENSE KB/ inventory of the world - i.e.
that knowledge we hold purely in sensory image form - and indeed in
common-sense form (since as Tye points out, we never actually
experience/operate one sense in isolation - even though we have the
intellectual illusion that we do).
When we learn to respect the extent of our true common sense knowledge of
the world as distinct from our formal, verbal knowledge of the world, we
will realise another major reason why CYC like projects are doomed. They
have nothing to do with common sense. Of course they will never be able to
work out, pace Minsky, whether you can whistle and eat at the same time, or
whether you can push or pull an object with a string. This is true common
sense knowledge.
-------------------------------------------
agi
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