Bob Mottram wrote:
On 29/02/2008, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
What you are doing is saying that to understand visual (or other)
images, or more generally to understand sequences like sequences of
words in a sentence, the mind MUST replay these on some internal viewing
screen.
Instead of a screen think of it as a kind of reflection. In an ideal
world the incoming data and the outgoing reflection (the prediction or
expectation) always synchronize. Because of the brain's limited
resources the reflection must be constituted from components which are
of lower complexity than the real world events which gave rise to
them, i.e. abstractions or simplifications (or compression if you want
to think of it that way). Higher conceptual levels are only really
made possible by this synchronization process, since an entirely
bottom up analysis of incoming data would simply be too ambiguous and
lead to combinatorial explosions.
I think this is right: the thing you are describing is the top-down
anticipation or expectation (aka "forward modelling") process, and what
it amounts to is an active attempt by the intelligence to maintain its
representation of the world.
What a real intelligence has to do is, as you say, to combine its
top-down expectation with the bottom-up flow of sensory data, and
continuously reconcile the two. This dynamic relaxation process is at
the core what "understanding" is. This all part of what it means for
the system to maintain a representation of the world, and it does this
in a "symbolic" way because the elements out of which the representation
is constructed are always abstractions (to a greater or lesser extent)
of the raw stream of sensory data.
I would not say, though, that this is the same as the "screen" that Mike
is refering to. He does not seem to be asking for the system to have an
internal world model, composed of expectation and incoming data - he
seems to want there to be a full, non-deconstructed copy of what the
eyes are seeing. It is the "non-deconstructed" that bothers me. It is
because of that that I say this is just homunculus talk.
Richard Loosemore
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agi
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