Brad Paulsen wrote:
James,
Someone ventured the *opinion* that keeping such a list of "things I
don't know" was "nonsensical," but I have yet to see any evidence or
well-reasoned argument backing that opinion. So, it's just an opinion.
One with which I, obviously, do not agree.
Please be clear about what was intended by my remarks.
I *now* have an explicit, episodic memory of confronting the question
"Who won the world series in 1954", and as a result of that episode that
occured today, I have the explicit knowledge that I do not know the
answer. Having that kind of explicit knowledge of lack-of-knowledge is
not problematic at all.
The only thing that seems implausible is that IN GENERAL we try to
answer questions by first looking up explicit elements that encode the
fact that we do not know the answer. As a general strategy this must,
surely, be deeply implausible, for the reasons that I originally gave,
which centered on the fact that the sheer quantity of unknowns would be
overwhelming for any system. For almost every one of the potentially
askable questions that would elicit, in me, a response of "I do not
know", there would not be any such episode. Similarly, it would be
clearly implausible for the cognitive system to spend its time making
lists of things that it did not know. If that is not an example of an
obviously implausible mechanism, then I do not know what would be.
This was not merely an "opinion", it was a reasoned argument,
illustrated by an example of a nonword that clearly belonged to a vast
class of nonwords.
Richard Loosemore
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agi
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