Bob: It's this linguistic tagging of
constellations of modality specific representations which is the real
power of the human brain, since it can permit arbitrary configurations
to be conjured up (literally re-membered) in a manner which is
reasonably efficient from an information compression perspective.
Bob,
That's what I'm arguing against. And I'm still groping here, because I'm
trying to contradict the "wisdom" of several thousand years of alphabetic
language or literate civilisation, which says that imaginative and body
knowledge is very secondary, if not peripheral or even entirely decorative
to symbolic forms of knowledge.
Actually, I'm suggesting, when you learn to play a sport, or physical skill,
and to perform all the various movements - all the various swings, kicks,
finger-presses etc - very, very little thinking goes on linguistically. Most
of the thinking is in body form - feeling with your body, including muscles
and senses, how comfortable and fluid and powerful and effective different
movements are - and how any objects you're using, like ball and racket or
piano keys, are reacting to your movements. *Some* linguistic thinking will
certainly be involved in this, but v. v. little.
Mainly what the linguistic thinking will do, I think, is to say to yourself
:"that's not working, try something else." But what that something else is,
you will have to find out most of the time with your body - "hands on".
Occasionally, you will formally, consciously analyse a movement, in part
using language - perhaps with the aid of a mirror or somesuch - but actually
this will only be occasional.
It's v. simple to begin to test all this - get up and kick a ball, or
practice a swing - and observe how many words you use to control and alter
your motions. V.v. little, right? Then go through your entire repertoire
and check out how much you can even begin to describe verbally.
Be interested in further comments, here - I've only just begun to truly
realise all this in the last month or so.
P.S. It isn't just our knowledge of select movements and select objects for
select skills that is primarily imaginative and body-form, but our knowledge
of the entire world of objects and creatures and their movements and
behaviours. We are continually thinking in principally body form not just
about how to move our own body, but how other bodies do and will move -
mirroring with those mirror neurons.
Mike Tintner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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.
Well in the case of a golf swing you might have some high level
reasoning, such as "I wanna move the ball, so I'm gonna try to hit it
with this big hunka metal". That might then get translated into a
kind of plan by the premotor cortex, such as grasping the handle in a
certain kind of way, shuffling your feet, looking down at the ball.
This plan might be represented in motor space as a set of
heirachically organised vectors which act as attractors for lower
level systems controlling tensioning of individual muscles. In the
final act the outcome would be a combination of the physical
properties of the system combined with feedback control of muscles.
The symbols in this kind of system are really flags of convenience.
Much knowledge is probably represented in a largely modality specific
way only a few abstractions away from the raw data of experience.
This can then be cross indexed via the thalamus and if necessary
associated with linguistic events. It's this linguistic tagging of
constellations of modality specific representations which is the real
power of the human brain, since it can permit arbitrary configurations
to be conjured up (literally re-membered) in a manner which is
reasonably efficient from an information compression perspective.
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agi
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agi
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