> 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.
Wrong... This knowledge CAN be expressed in logical, symbolic form... just as can the positions of all the particles in my brain ... but for these cases, the logical, symbolic representation is highly awkward and inefficient... >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. That is true, but in principle one could give a formal logical description of them, boiling things all the way down to logical atoms corresponding to the signals sent along the nerves to and from my fingers... > 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. Correct > It would be utterly impossible to name all > the details of that knowledge. Infeasible, not impossible > 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 concept of infinity is better handled in formal logic than anywhere else!!! > 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. Again you seem to be playing with different meanings of the word "symbolic." I don't think that formal logic is a suitably convenient language for describing motor movements or dealing with motor learning. But still, I strongly suspect one can produce software programs that do handle motor movement and learning effectively. They are symbolic at the level of the programming language, but not symbolic at the level of the deliberative, reflective component of the artificial mind doing the learning. A symbol is a symbol **to some system**. Just because a hunk of program code contains symbols to the programmer, doesn't mean it contains symbols to the mind it helps implement. Any more than a neuron being a symbol to a neuroscientist, implies that neuron is a symbol to the mind it helps implement. Anyway, I agree with you that formal logical rules and inference are not the end-all of AGI and are not the right tool for handling visual imagination or motor learning. But I do think they have an important role to play even so. -- Ben G ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
