Ben: One advantage AGIs will have over humans is better methods for
translating
procedural to declarative knowledge, and vice versa. For us to translate
"knowing how to do X" into
"knowing how we do X" can be really difficult (I play piano
improvisationally and by
ear, and I have a hard time figuring out what the hell my fingers are
doing, even though
they do the same complex things repeatedly each time I play the same
song..). This is
not a trivial problem for AGIs either but it won't be as hard as for
humans...
Your piano example is a good one.
What it illustrates, I suggest, is:
your knowledge of, and thinking about, how to play the piano, and perform
the many movements involved, is overwhelmingly imaginative and body
knowledge/thinking (contained in images and the motor parts of the brain and
body as distinct from any kind of symbols)
The percentage of that knowledge that can be expressed in symbolic form -
logical, mathematical, verbal etc- i.e. the details of those movements that
can be named or measured - is only A TINY FRACTION of the total. Our
cultural let alone your personal vocabulary (both linguistic and of any
other symbolic form) for all the different finger movements you will
perform, can only name a tiny percentage of the details involved.
We see/sense, think, and move vastly more than we can put into words or
symbols.
Such imaginative and body knowledge (which takes both declarative,
procedural and episodic forms) isn't, I suggest, - when considered as
corpuses or corpora of knowledge - MEANT to be put into explicit, symbolic,
verbal, logico-mathematical form. It would be utterly impossible to name all
the details of that knowledge. One imaginative picture : an infinity of
words and other symbols. Any attempt to symbolise our imaginative/body
knowledge as a whole, would simply overwhelm our brain, or indeed any brain.
The idea that an AGI can symbolically encode all the knowledge, and perform
all the thinking, necessary to produce, say, a golf swing, let alone play a
symphony, is a pure fantasy. Our system keeps that knowledge and thinking
largely in the motor areas of the brain and body, because that's where it
HAS to be.
-------------------------------------------
agi
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