Richard Loosemore wrote:
Brad Paulsen wrote:
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.
Ah, but I am trying to suggest, quite deliberately, that a "feeling of
not knowing" something can be exactly explained by a mechanism that
tracks the progress in a recognition episode, and does a time out. So
this is not the absence of knowing, this is a mechanism that knows that
it does not know.
Now, you refer to something that you label "an absence of a feeling of
knowing", and you suggest that this might be different from a feeling of
not knowing" ..... but I honestly do not think that the first thing is
well defined. It sounds like something not happening, whereas what I am
suggesting is that there is a monitoring mechanism that, at a specific
time, kicks in and says "I declare that, since nothing has happened in
this recognition episode, we KNOW positively that this piece of
information is not in the system". This would indeed, as you put it, be
a definitive declaration of that mental state.
No. You brought up the "absence of a feeling of knowing." I agree it's not
well defined, which is why I brought it up in my reply. I understand your point
about a "time out." That would, roughly, correspond to the point in search
(i.e., recognition) where the search mechanism feels justified in declaring it
has no knowledge about the thing it's trying to recognize. The criteria will
probably depend on the type of search mechanism.
(To be precise, though, I should say that the system *believes* that it
does not know: there is a whole research literature regarding people
thinking that they do not know something, where in fact they do know it,
but often implicitly. But let's not go in that direction).
Actually, I believe all knowledge is belief. It's the distance one must jump
from one's conclusions to one's premises that makes an knowledge feel less like
belief and more like "hard fact." Either way, the result would be more or less
the same (although false "not knowing" would probably resolve itself quicker).
As for the role of "search" in this: yes, you could construe it as a
form of search. However, there are many circumstances in parallel
constraint satisfaction (e.g. neural nets) where it is stretching a
point to call it "search". However, I do not really want to dispute
that point either: I think it is a matter of convention whether a
neural net activation of a large number of microfeatures, for example,
should be called search or not.
What I did disagree with was the idea that there might be a search for
(in the case of your first, lexical example) a specific nonword, which
then was eventually *successful* because it found a lexical item
corresponding to the target nonword, together with a label attached to
it saying "not known". I can make sense of a search (massively parallel
or otherwise) that ends in a timeout, which then causes something to say
"Because we did not find a match within the timeout period, the item or
fact is not known", but I cannot make sense of a mechanism that must
find the target, together with a label attached to it saying that the
item is not known. Searches are not a problem, only searches of that
peculiar sort.
Sorry. That first example was not well thought out. In my defense, I speak
Norwegian so I missed the phonological surface feature "problem" with that
example. I still shouldn't have missed it, but I did.
What I wanted to emphasize was the fact that if you are happy that the
feeling of knowing could be explained by a search-plus-timeout mechanism
(or, as I would prefer to phrase it, a constraint-satisfaction-plus-
timeout mechanism), then your initial question was quite easy to answer,
and not so very mysterious.
Actually, one of the benefits of having a list of things not known comes from
being able to search it for a positive result without having to exhaustively
(however one defines that) search the (presumably much larger) list of things
known. Again, I'm using "list" here generically -- I'm not concerned about the
memory storage mechanism (not here, at least).
In the case of the semantic example (trying to answer the question "Who
won the World Series in 1954?") the mechanism would look the same as in
the lexical example, provided that you used constraint satisfaction to
get there. Initially, the words would activate associated concepts
(baseball, United States, sports, historical events, people's names,
team names, city names ...), and it would also activated concepts that
that captured self-knowledge, such as the fact that (in my case) I know
almost nothing of baseball, being that I am English. All of those
concepts would gel into a framework representing the question itself and
also the knowledge that I have about the context of the question, and
out of that interacting melange of concepts would emerge a stable state,
among which be the meta-knowledge about what happened as a result of
allowing all this to percolate through the system. And one part of all
that would be the knowledge that the network of concepts had settled
into a steady state after the question, but the "slot" for "name of team
that won in 1954" would have nothing in it. It is the combination of
the steady state and the lack of a filler in the relevant slot that
would lead the system to conclude that it did not know the answer.
That sounds like a *lot* of work. And it sounds like it would have to be
repeated every time you ran into that query (which may be never again, but humor
me for a sec...). If at the end of the process the first time (i.e., when you
didn't know you didn't know the answer), you put that query (or the
meta-knowledge about what happened) on the things I don't know list, wouldn't
that act to keep the subsequent percolation time to a minimum? And, couldn't it
also act as an on-going subconscious means to activate the desire for conscious
learning?
Now, sometimes the lack of knowledge comes quickly, and sometimes it
comes slowly. In the case of your question, my brain came to the
conclusion very quickly. But to someone else it might be that they try
for a while, before realizing that they do not really know the answer.
The speed at which the conclusion appears is a function of how quickly
the concepts settle down into a stable configuration that does not
include a slot filler.
Again, it is not that I dispute the role of "search". I only dispute
that the problem is particularly difficult to imagine a solution for (at
least, it is *not* difficult in a constraint-satisfaction formalism, but
I would not be surprised if in some other formalism it turned out to be
difficult.... I did ask you about that in my first message, because I
quite open to the possibility that some formalism might make it into
more of a problem than I think it is), and secondly, I would dispute
that the system keeps lists of stuff that it does not know, as a general
policy.
Well, now, that was a very satisfying response! You took at least part of my
initial post seriously and provided some very good arguments for a paradigm in
which the "feeling of not knowing" would be generated. And, your scenario makes
as much sense to me as the one I proposed. You have taught me something and,
for that, I thank you very much! We continue to disagree on the "list"
business. I should point out, once again, that I am using that term as a
conversational convenience, not literally. Perhaps the same functionality could
be provided in the form of feedback to a constraint mechanism.
Cheers,
Brad
Richard Loosemore
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