Richard Loosemore wrote:
Brad Paulsen wrote:
Richard Loosemore wrote:
Brad Paulsen wrote:
All,
Here's a question for you:
What does fomlepung mean?
If your immediate (mental) response was "I don't know." it means
you're not a slang-slinging Norwegian. But, how did your brain
produce that "feeling of not knowing"? And, how did it produce that
feeling so fast?
Your brain may have been able to do a massively-parallel search of
your entire memory and come up "empty." But, if it does this, it's
subconscious. No one to whom I've presented the above question has
reported a conscious "feeling of searching" before having the
conscious feeling of not knowing.
It could be that your brain keeps a "list of things I don't know."
I tend to think this is the case, but it doesn't explain why your
brain can react so quickly with the feeling of not knowing when it
doesn't know it doesn't know (e.g., the very first time it
encounters the word "fomlepung").
My intuition tells me the feeling of not knowing when presented with
a completely novel concept or event is a product of the "Danger,
Will Robinson!", reptilian part of our brain. When we don't know we
don't know something we react with a feeling of not knowing as a
survival response. Then, having survived, we put the thing not
known at the head of our list of "things I don't know." As long as
that thing is in this list it explains how we can come to the
feeling of not knowing it so quickly.
Of course, keeping a large list of "things I don't know" around is
probably not a good idea. I suspect such a list will naturally get
smaller through atrophy. You will probably never encounter the
fomlepung question again, so the fact that you don't know what it
means will become less and less important and eventually it will
drop off the end of the list. And...
Another intuition tells me that the list of "things I don't know",
might generate a certain amount of cognitive dissonance the
resolution of which can only be accomplished by seeking out new
information (i.e., "learning")? If so, does this mean that such a
list in an AGI could be an important element of that AGI's "desire"
to learn? From a functional point of view, this could be something
as simple as a scheduled background task that checks the "things I
don't know" list occasionally and, under the right circumstances,
"pings" the AGI with a pang of cognitive dissonance from time to time.
So, what say ye?
Isn't this a bit of a no-brainer? Why would the human brain need to
keep lists of things it did not know, when it can simply break the
word down into components, then have mechanisms that watch for the
rate at which candidate lexical items become activated .... when
this mechanism notices that the rate of activation is well below the
usual threshold, it is a fairly simple thing for it to announce that
the item is not known.
Keeping lists of "things not known" is wildly, outrageously
impossible, for any system! Would we really expect that the word
"ikrwfheuigjsjboweonwjebgowinwkjbcewijcniwecwoicmuwbpiwjdncwjkdncowk-
owejwenowuycgxnjwiiweudnpwieudnwheudxiweidhuxehwuixwefgyjsdhxeiowudx-
hwieuhyxweipudxhnweduiweodiuweydnxiweudhcnhweduweiducyenwhuwiepixuwe-
dpiuwezpiweudnzpwieumzweuipweiuzmwepoidumw" is represented somewhere
as a "word that I do not know"? :-)
I note that even in the simplest word-recognition neural nets that I
built and studied in the 1990s, activation of a nonword proceeded in
a very different way than activation of a word: it would have been
easy to build something to trigger a "this is a nonword" neuron.
Is there some type of AI formalism where nonword recognition would be
problematic?
Richard Loosemore
Richard,
You seem to have decided my request for comment was about word
(mis)recognition. It wasn't. Unfortunately, I included a misleading
example in my initial post. A couple of list members called me on it
immediately (I'd expect nothing less from this group -- and this was a
valid criticism duly noted). So far, three people have pointed out
that a query containing an un-common (foreign, slang or both) word is
one way to quickly generate the "feeling of not knowing." But, it is
just that: only one way. Not all "feelings of not knowing" are
produced by linguistic analysis of surface features. In fact, I would
guess that the vast majority of them are not so generated. Still,
some are and pointing this out was a valid contribution (perhaps that
example was fortunately bad).
I don't think my query is a no-brainer to answer (unless you want to
make it one) and your response, since it contained only another
"flavor" of the previous two responses, gives me no reason whatsoever
to change my opinion.
Please take a look at the revised example in this thread. I don't
think it has the same problems (as an example) as did the initial
example. In particular, all of the words are common (American
English) and the syntax is valid.
Well, no, I did understand that your point was a general one (I just
focused on the example because it was there, if you see what I mean).
But the same response applies exactly to any other version of the
"absence of a feeling of knowing" question. Thus: the system tries to
assemble a set of elements (call them symbols, nodes, or whatever) that
together form a consistent interpretation of the input, but the progress
of the assembly operation is monitored, and it is quite easy to tell if
the assembly of a consistent interpretation is going well or not. When
the monitor detects that there are no significant elements becoming
activated in a strong way, it can reliably say that this input is
something that the system does not know.
So that would apply to a question like "Who won the 1945 World Series"
as much as it would to the appearance of a simple non-word.
In principle, there is nothing terribly difficult about such a mechanism.
Richard Loosemore
The question was about the "feeling of not knowing" not the "absence of a
feeling of knowing." These could be quite different feelings. I prefer to
stick to the more positive version commonly evinced by the statement "I don't
know." Characterizing this as "absence of a feeling of knowing" implies there
is a "normal feeling of knowing" typically present that is felt as "absent" in
the presence of a query such as the "World Series" example query. I would not
be prepared to argue that position, but I can argue there is a "feeling of not
knowing" since an "I don't know" response is a definitive declaration of that
mental state.
Your general description of "monitoring" during "the progress of the assembly"
contains implicit within it some form of search. There is nothing in the query
statement, itself, that would engender the "feeling of not knowing" (as would a
phonological surface feature anomaly) without performing a semantic (meaning)
analysis. Such an analysis will require a search (e.g., of concepts). It,
therefore, falls under one of the mechanisms posited in my initial post.
If you think the analysis in the last paragraph is incorrect, I would appreciate
it if you could provide a concrete example of monitoring the process of the
assembly.
Cheers,
Brad
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agi
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