An excellent post, thanks! IMO, it raises the bar for discussion of language and AGI, and should be carefully considered by the authors of future posts on the topic of language and AGI. If the AGI list were a forum, Matthias's post should be pinned!
-dave On Sun, Oct 19, 2008 at 6:58 PM, Dr. Matthias Heger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The process of outwardly expressing meaning may be fundamental to any > social > intelligence but the process itself needs not much intelligence. > > Every email program can receive meaning, store meaning and it can express > it > outwardly in order to send it to another computer. It even can do it > without > loss of any information. Regarding this point, it even outperforms humans > already who have no conscious access to the full meaning (information) in > their brains. > > The only thing which needs much intelligence from the nowadays point of > view > is the learning of the process of outwardly expressing meaning, i.e. the > learning of language. The understanding of language itself is simple. > > To show that intelligence is separated from language understanding I have > already given the example that a person could have spoken with Einstein but > needed not to have the same intelligence. Another example are humans who > cannot hear and speak but are intelligent. They only have the problem to > get > the knowledge from other humans since language is the common social > communication protocol to transfer knowledge from brain to brain. > > In my opinion language is overestimated in AI for the following reason: > When we think we believe that we think in our language. From this we > conclude that our thoughts are inherently structured by linguistic > elements. > And if our thoughts are so deeply connbected with language then it is a > small > step to conclude that our whole intelligence depends inherently on > language. > > But this is a misconception. > We do not have conscious control over all of our thoughts. Most of the > activities within our brain we cannot be aware of when we think. > Nevertheless it is very useful and even essential for human intelligence > being able to observe at least a subset of the own thoughts. It is this > subset which we usually identify with the whole set of thoughts. But in > fact > it is just a tiny subset of all what happens in the 10^11 neurons. > For the top-level observation of the own thoughts the brain uses the > learned > language. > But this is no contradiction to the point that language is just a > communication protocol and nothing else. The brain translates its patterns > into language and routes this information to its own input regions. > > The reason why the brain uses language in order to observe its own thoughts > is probably the following: > If a person A wants to communicate some of its patterns to a person B then > it has solve two problems: > 1. How to compress the patterns? > 2. How to send the patterns to the person B? > The solution for the two problems is language. > > If a brain wants to observe its own thoughts it has to solve the same > problems. > The thoughts have to be compressed. If not you would observe every element > of your thoughts and you would end up in an explosion of complexity. So why > not use the same compression algorithm as it is used for communication with > other people? That's the reason why the brain uses language when it > observes > its own thoughts. > > This phenomenon leads to the misconception that language is inherently > connected with thoughts and intelligence. In fact it is just a top level > communication protocol between two brains and within a single brain. > > Future AGI will have a much broader bandwidth and even for the current > possibilities of technology human language would be a weak communication > protocol for its internal observation of its own thoughts. > > - Matthias > > > ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=117534816-b15a34 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
