Richard:Now, if what you *meant* to talk about was links between action and perception, all well and good, but I was just addressing the above comment of yours.
I'm certainly not reiterating an ancient debate. This has been from the start an exploratory thread. Prinz summarises fairly well what is happening:
"Up until recently, cognitive scientists were happy to parcel up the mind-machine into neat parts. We had perception on one side, which is in the business of representing inputs from the external world. Then we had action, on the other side, which controls an organism’s outputs, or behavior. Nestled between these “peripheral systems” when had central systems, which were presumed be the main engines of “cognition” or “thinking.” Each of these systems was supposed to work independently, like separate committees in a great corporation, only vaguely away of what the others are up to. In cogsci lingo, each system was supposed to use proprietary rules and representations. Oh, how times have changed. We are now living in an era of border disputes. The orthodox divisions of the mind are being attacked. I have tried to join the front lines myself on occasion. I think the border between perception and cognition needs to be renegotiated: thinking does not use a proprietary code; it redeploys representations used to perceive the world (Prinz 2002). I’m inclined to think that cognition also avails itself of representations used for action"
Now what I was reaching for at the beginning - was that all the talk of developing bodies of knowledge in AI/AGI, that I'm seeing, seems to belong to the "old days" of "separate committees." Mark's comment, for example, seemed to me reasonably typical - essentially : "we can leave testing till later - that's a separate department."
What is emerging, it seems to me, is the start of a cog. sci. synthesis which sees perception, action, thought, problemsolving, knowledge-gathering and embodied "mirroring" and possibly still more, as interdependent and in the final analysis, inseparable.
Perception/vision, for example, isn't simply interwoven with action, because we have to turn our heads hither and thither, but because we want to consider grasping, or otherwise moving to respond to, what we see.
And more formal modes of knowledge-gathering are an extension of these processes.
Our gathering of bodies of knowledge about the world, is evidence- and experiment-based - IOW depends on our being able to see AND grasp things physically. And while we certainly take a great deal on varying degrees of trust, it is all built on the basis of physically seeing and touching some of the world.
There is no such thing, IOW, as pure knowledge and knowledge-gathering, contained only in texts and webpages, and tested only logically "in the head" - and AI/AGI seem to rather depend on that.
Any AGI system, to take one small example, would have a hard time understanding the considerable amount of science that is involved in discussion of the reliability of different kinds of evidence and their gathering.
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