Terren,
This is going too far. We can reconstruct to a considerable extent how
humans think about problems - their conscious thoughts. Artists have been
doing this reasonably well for hundreds of years. Science has so far avoided
this, just as it avoided studying first the mind, with behaviourism, then
consciousness,. The main reason cognitive science and psychology have
avoided stream-of-thought studies (apart from v. odd scientists like Jerome
Singer) is that conscious thought about problems is v. different from the
highly ordered, rational, thinking of programmed computers which cog. sci.
uses as its basic paradigm. In fact, human thinking is fundamentally
different - the conscious self has major difficulty concentrating on any
problem for any length of time - controlling the mind for more than a
relatively few seconds, (as religious and humanistic thinkers have been
telling us for thousands of years). Computers of course have perfect
concentration forever. But that's because computers haven't had to deal with
the type of problems that we do - the problematic problems where you don't,
basically, know the answer, or how to find the answer, before you start.
For this kind of problem - which is actually what differentiates AGI from
narrow AI - human thinking, creative as opposed to rational, stumbling,
scatty, and freely associative, is actually IDEAL, for all its
imperfections.
Yes, even if we extend our model of intelligence to include creative as well
as rational thinking, it will still be an impoverished model, which may not
include embodied thinking and perhaps other dimensions. But hey, we'll get
there bit by bit, (just not, as we both agree, all at once in one five-year
leap).
Terren:> My points about the pitfalls of theorizing about intelligence apply
to any and all humans who would attempt it - meaning, it's not necessary to
characterize AI folks in one way or another. There are any number of aspects
of intelligence we could highlight that pose a challenge to orthodox models
of intelligence, but the bigger point is that there are fundamental limits
to the ability of an intelligence to observe itself, in exactly the same way
that an eye cannot see itself.
Consciousness and intelligence are present in every possible act of
contemplation, so it is impossible to gain a vantage point of intelligence
from outside of it. And that's exactly what we pretend to do when we
conceptualize it within an artificial construct. This is the principle
conceit of AI, that we can understand intelligence in an objective way,
and model it well enough to reproduce by design.
Terren
--- On Tue, 7/1/08, Mike Tintner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Terren:It's to make the larger point that we may be so
immersed in our own
conceptualizations of intelligence - particularly because
we live in our
models and draw on our own experience and introspection to
elaborate them -
that we may have tunnel vision about the possibilities for
better or
different models. Or, we may take for granted huge swaths
of what makes us
so smart, because it's so familiar, or below the radar
of our conscious
awareness, that it doesn't even occur to us to reflect
on it.
No 2 is more relevant - AI-ers don't seem to introspect
much. It's an irony
that the way AI-ers think when creating a program bears v.
little
resemblance to the way programmed computers think. (Matt
started to broach
this when he talked a while back of computer programming as
an art). But
AI-ers seem to have no interest in the discrepancy - which
again is ironic,
because analysing it would surely help them with their
programming as well
as the small matter of understanding how general
intelligence actually
works.
In fact - I just looked - there is a longstanding field on
psychology of
programming. But it seems to share the deficiency of
psychology and
cognitive science generally which is : no study of the
stream-of-conscious-thought, especially conscious
problemsolving. The only
AI figure I know who did take some interest here was
Herbert Simon who
helped establish the use of verbal protocols.
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