There is one common feature to all chairs: They are for the purpose of
sitting on. I think it is important that this is *not* a visual
characteristic.
There are several objections that you could raise, but I think that
all of them will follow from the fuzziness of language, not the
fuzziness of the actual concepts. To take a recently-mentioned
example, the chair of the board is not for sitting on. (And the
"board" is not made of wood...) Similarly I will argue that
metaphorical thinking causes concept fuzziness only once it is
communicated: the increasingly general notions associated with a word
are actually separate concepts under one lingual label.
-Abram
On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 1:00 PM, Mike Tintner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>
> YKY:
>
> MT:> Jeez, there is NO concept that is not dependent on context. There is NO
> concept that is not infinitely fuzzy and open-ended in itself, period -
> which is the principal reason why language is and has to be grounded
> (although that needs demonstration).
> YKY:My current approach is to use fuzzy rules to model these concepts. In
> some cases it seems to work but in other cases it seems problematic...
>
> For example I can give a definition of the concept "chair":
>
> chair(X) :-
> X has leg #1,
> X has leg #2,
> X has leg #3,
> X has leg #4,
> X has a horizontal seat area,
> X has a vertical back area,
> leg #1 is connected to seat at position #1,
> etc,
> etc....
>
> But what if a chair has one leg missing? Using fuzzy logic (fuzzy AND), the
> missing leg will result in a fuzzy value close to 0, which is not quite
> right.
>
> Probabilistic logic is also inappropriate. I know *every* time that a chair
> missing a leg is "somewhat" a chair -- there is no probability involved
> here.
>
> REPLY:
>
> YKY,
>
> We can kill a whole flock with one stone here - both the infinite
> open-endedness of concepts AND, as a consequence, why any
> General-Intelligence-level reasoning *must* be grounded in sensory images
> and imagination.
>
> You couldn't have picked a more archetypal concept. "Chair", from my
> indirect reading, is the concept Plato picked to illustrate his idea that
> eternal forms must underlie concepts and words and the objects to which
> they refer. He suffered from the illusion that all AI/AGI-ers suffer from -
> & that literate culture - which dates from the alphabetic Greeks to approx.
> 2008, now that multimediate culture is replacing it - also suffers from.
> Namely that words and other symbols refer to real structures or forms of
> objects. We can look at millions of different chairs, and yet instantly
> recognize that they all fit the word "chair" Therefore there is a) an
> "essence of chair" and b) the word "c-ha-i-r" somehow captures that essence.
> and c) that essence can be defined with more words. ( I doubt that this
> illusion would have been possible in pre-alphabetic culture, when words were
> rendered in more or less *pictographic* rather than alphabetic form and
> therefore did not have a standardised, uniform form).
>
> AGI-ers certainly believe that words - and those essences of objects - can
> be successfully defined with other words, and therefore that purely verbal/
> symbolic, or ungrounded reasoning is possible. Of course, they are all
> aware, YKY and esp. Ben included, that this may be a very complex business.
> In Ben's case, that it may take a massive CYC-scale operation to fully
> define any word. But it can be done. Oh yes, it can be done. He has no doubt
> of that.
>
> Well, let's see. ("See" being the operative word). Let's look at some
> chairs. You will note in the following two chair picture sets - which BTW I
> consider (& please disagree) an awesome a) set of pictures b) set of human
> creativity and c) examples of the mind's powers of categorization, that you
> can recognize almost every example as a *chair* immediately - although you
> will probably question a few.
>
> But I defy you to define any single attribute of "chair" that they all
> share, (they certainly don't all have "legs").
>
> 1. CHAIR SLIDES
> http://www.mediafire.com/?mwm5ivjmmcd
>
> 2. SET OF CHAIRS
> http://www.mediafire.com/imageview.php?quickkey=vmj2jkptlcn&thumb=4
>
> I further defy you to define any attribute of chair, period, including
> "seat" or "something to sit on" that an inventor has not already, or could
> not, circumvent - and still produce a recognizable "chair."
>
> By extension, you will not be able to definitively define any concept,
> period - "table," "cow". "human," let alone prepositions like "in" (Ben's
> word in his essay), "through", or "over." - let alone mildly to massively
> complex processes like "push,"handle","conversation," "sex", "evolution."
> Nor will you be able to definitively define any *individual* - *Ben
> Goertzel," "Pei Wang," "Madonna."
>
> All these concepts can be defined in infinitely open-ended ways because the
> classes of object, both artificial and natural, that they refer to are
> themselves infinitely *open-form* and, usually, evolving - constrained by
> some parameters, perhaps, but not limited. .
>
> How then did you come to form the concept of "chair", "table," "cat", "dog"
> etc. or "Ben G" from these open sets of forms? Not verbally or
> symbolically. You did it the same way your evolutionary parents did - the
> way all those apes, bears, snakes, birds etc recognized each other - who
> despite having no words have plenty of general intelligence. You did it by
> visual and other image processing. Processes which do not and cannot result
> in a single coherent image or template, but result rather in a *flexible
> set* of images. What is your imagistic concept of "amoeba"? There is not and
> cannot be a single one for such an open-form, continuously form-changing
> object. It has to be rendered - ideally/normatively as well as
> psychologically - by a set of flexible images. Just as continuous
> form-changing processes like "sex" and "foreplay" have to be rendered and
> "defined" by flexible sets of images.
>
> Words are just useful labels stuck on top of this flexible image processing
> - useful *precisely* because they serve to encapsulate *several* images with
> *one,* fixed, "magical" label.
>
> So if you are going to be able to handle concepts and recognize whether
> either an actual object or a verbal description of an object constitutes a
> proper example of that class of object - if you're say going to respond to
> "well, a Hockney chair is too fragmented in my mind to be a true chair," -
> or "Clintonian sex is not really sex," you will have to consult the image(s)
> of that object, either in actuality or your mind's eye.
>
> You will have to *ground* your thought processing - no verbal set of
> definitions can satisfactorily encompass those infinite sets of forms.
>
> Yes,sometimes, purely verbal processing will work. Computer language
> translation IS useful. But it will always be far too flawed as a whole
> to constitute general intelligence - because it will keep running into
> exceptions to its verbal definitions.
>
> [And bear in mind that we have only talked so far atomistically about
> interpreting *individual* concepts. When we start to talk "molecularly"
> about understanding combinations of two or more concepts - deciding whether
> a "cow" or "cat" or "tractor" can or can't "sit" "on" or "have sex with" a
> "table," "chair".etc .. the idea of producing any kind of symbolic formula
> that could encompass the "infinitely squared" possibilities is
> stratospherically absurd.)
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________
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