Richard Loosemore wrote:
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.
Ah. Now we're getting somewhere! I do *not* (and did not) propose that we keep
a list of "all the things unknown" in memory. Nor did I propose some
"background" task that would maintain or add to such a list. That would be
"...wildly, outrageously impossible, for any system!" Maybe, instead of
assuming the worse (that I could be so ignorant as to propose such a list), you
might have asked for some "clarification?"
The list of "things I don't know" is, by definition, a list of "things I know I
don't know." How could I *possibly* know about things I don't know I don't
know? The list I propose contains ONLY those things we know we don't know.
Such a list is, in my opinion, completely manageable and, indeed, helpful
information to have around. When we first encounter a completely novel object
or event we will have to search (percolate, whatever) for it in memory and come
up empty (however you want to define that). It is then, and *only* then, that
we put this knowledge (or meta-knowledge) on the "things (I know) I don't know"
list.
This list can be consulted before performing a search of all memory to determine
if there's a need to do such an exhaustive search. If the thing we're trying to
remember is on the "things (I know) I don't know" list, we can very quickly
report the "feeling of not knowing." Otherwise, we have to do the exhaustive
(however you define that) search of things we do know and come up empty. Such a
list can also be used by subconscious processes to power our desire to learn.
Presumably, we experience cognitive dissonance when we feel there's something we
know nothing about and want to resolve that feeling. How? By learning. Once
learned, the thing falls off the "things (I know) I don't know" list.
Similarly, if an item is on the list for a long time, it will naturally "fall
off" the list (the "use it or lose it" principle). Both of these "natural"
actions will work, I believe, to keep this list quite small.
Sometimes (well, don't ask my ex) I can be a bit thick. I know you're all
surprised to hear that, but...
It just dawned on me that much of the uproar here may have been caused by a
miscommunication (gee, where have we heard of that happening before?). I may
have used the term "things we don't know" to denote the "things we know we don't
know" list. If so, please accept my apologies. Having played with these
questions for a long time, this *important* distinction apparently became lost
to me and I began to assume it self-evident that a "things we don't know" list
would have had to come into being as the result of our encounters with those
things when they were "things we didn't know we didn't know" (and, therefore,
could not be in any list of knowledge we had -- we are clueless about these
things until we encounter them).
If that's the case, let me (finally) be clear: the "list" I am talking about in
the human or AGI agent's memory is a list of THINGS I KNOW I DON'T KNOW. In the
first (misleading) example I gave, the word "fomlepung" would be on that list
after the query containing it had resulted in the "I don't know" answer (how
that determination is made is really a minor point for this discussion). In the
second example query I gave, the "Which team won the 1924 World Series?" would
also, after eliciting the "I don't know" response, find its way onto this list.
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.
Well, be fair, it was an opinion before. Here it is a well-reasoned argument.
Something I could actually agree or disagree with. Thank you!
Cheers,
Brad
Richard Loosemore
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