Mark Waser wrote:
> Richard Loosemore wrote:
> I cannot see any reason that COMPELS me to believe that such a clean
> version [i.e. a non-complex cognitive system] can be built.
I cannot see any reason that COMPELS me to believe that it cannot.
Humans look to me to be pretty complicated but not all that complex
(using your definitions).
I just thought of a good way to state the reasons why we should strongly
suspect that complexity is going to make itself felt in an intelligent
system.
To be able to say that you cannot see any reason that COMPELS you to
believe that there is a significant amount of complexity in cognition, I
think you have to be sure of several things (and this list could be
longer, but I'll stop at these for the moment):
1) That analogy-making, whatever it is, is definitely not the sort of
tangled operators-begetting-new-operators mechanism that I described
last time.
2) That when symbols are combined in the process of thinking, the
combination process definitely does not involve any interactions that
are complex. For example, understanding the syntax and semantics of a
sentence must on no account resemble the process of folding that allows
a string of amino acids to fold up into a protein (unquestionably
complex), instead, understanding of a sentence must always proceed in a
deterministic way.
3) When new symbols are built from old, by whatever learning mechanisms
do this, the process cannot involve any interactions that are tangled
enough to be complex. Again, for example, this process cannot resemble
protein folding in the sense of being a constraint-driven relaxation
whereby the system finds an optimal new symbol to capture an abstraction
of some existing symbols. This process must be determinstic.
4) When reasoning or problem-solving processes occur, the system must
choose the appropriate representations in which to express the problem
to be solved, and this process of representation-choice must not involve
any complex mechanisms (again, imagine the role that a relaxation
mechanism like protein-folding might play here ... all those factors
that come together to determine the best choice of representation, they
MUST not be like a complex relaxation process). We all know that in an
AI, the choice of representation can sometimes determine whether or not
the system can actually solve the problem.
5) When reasoning has to be controlled and curtailed by an Inference
Control Engine (as it always does, in a real-world AGI), this ICE must
not involve complex processes. No kludges are allowed to get the ICE
working, no adaptive processes allowed inside the ICE to ensure that it
remains effective as the system expands.
6) When the grounding mechanisms operate to build symbols in a way that
keeps their semantics consistent with the semantics implicit in the
architecture of the AGI (remember, a properly grounded system does not
have a semantics imposed on it, it must adhere to the semantics that is
implicit in the way that the symbols are used), you must be sure that
whatever symbols are built, the *implicit* meaning of the symbol-innards
is consistent with whatever meaning you decided to assume when you
designed the mechanisms that operate on those symbols. So, if you
decide to attach a 'probability' parameter to symbols that represent
facts, the way that your mechanisms use that p value must be
semantically consistent with the implicit semantics coming out of the
grounding mechanisms ... which means that the latter must all be
non-complex and semantically transparent throughout.
You have to be SURE that in each of these areas, the mechanisms that you
have got, or that you will find in the future, will all be free of any
taint of complexity, to be able to say that "I see no reason why this
cannot be done without complexity". This is the degree of certainty
that you must have.
Now, bear in mind that we do not know how to build most of these
mechanisms, and that all attempts to build mechanisms to do these things
have fallen woefully short of demonstrating their feasibility in an AGI
context.
And yet, in spite of that, you feel confident that all of these things
can be done without any danger that complex mechanisms might creep in?
How so?
... Because it seems to me that all the best efforts to understand these
things are heading in the direction of interpreting these things, in the
human cognitive system, as being rather closer to protein-folding than
determinstic programs. So in that context, how would one be so SURE
that all of these can be done some other, non-complex way?
That is why I say that the boot is on the other foot.
What do you think?
Richard Loosemore
-------------------------------------------
agi
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