The process of translating patterns into language should be easier than the process of creating patterns or manipulating patterns. Therefore I say that language understanding is easy.
When you say that language is not fully specified then you probably imagine an AGI which learns language. This is a complete different thing. Learning language is difficult as I already have mentioned. Language cannot be translated into meaning. Meaning is a mapping from a linguistic string to patterns. Email programs are not just point to point repeaters. They receive data in a certain communication protocol. They translate these data into an internal representation and store the data. And they can translate their internal data into a linguistic representation to send the data to another email client. This process of communication is conceptually the same as we can observe it with humans. The word "meaning" was bad chosen from me. But brains do not transfer meaning as well. They also just transfer data. Meaning is a mapping. You *believe* that language cannot be separated from intelligence. I don't and I have described a model which has a strict separation. We both have no proof. - Matthias >>> Mark Waser [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote BUT! This also holds true for language! Concrete unadorned statements convey a lot less information than statements loaded with adjectives, adverbs, or even more markedly analogies (or innuendos or . . . ). A child cannot pick up the same amount of information from a sentence that they think that they understand (and do understand to some degree) that an adult can. Language is a knowledge domain like any other and high intelligences can use it far more effectively than lower intelligences. ** Or, in other words, I am disagreeing with the statement that "the process itself needs not much intelligence". Saying that the understanding of language itself is simple is like saying that chess is simple because you understand the rules of the game. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem can be used to show that there is no upper bound on the complexity of language and the intelligence necessary to pack and extract meaning/knowledge into/from language. Language is *NOT* just a top-level communications protocol because it is not fully-specified and because it is tremendously context-dependent (not to mention entirely Godellian). These two reasons are why it *IS* inextricably tied into intelligence. I *might* agree that the concrete language of lower primates and young children is separate from intelligence, but there is far more going on in adult language than a simple communications protocol. E-mail programs are simply point-to-point repeaters of language (NOT meaning!) Intelligences generally don't exactly repeat language but *try* to repeat meaning. The game of telephone is a tremendous example of why language *IS* tied to intelligence (or look at the results of translating simple phrases into another language and back -- "The drink is strong but the meat is rotten"). Translating language to and from meaning (i.e. your domain model) is the essence of intelligence. How simple is the understanding of the above? How much are you having to fight to relate it to your internal model (assuming that it's even compatible :-)? I don't believe that intelligence is inherent upon language EXCEPT that language is necessary to convey knowledge/meaning (in order to build intelligence in a reasonable timeframe) and that language is influenced by and influences intelligence since it is basically the core of the critical meta-domains of teaching, learning, discovery, and alteration of your internal model (the effectiveness of which *IS* intelligence). Future AGI and humans will undoubtedly not only have a much richer language but also a much richer repertoire of second-order (and higher) features expressed via language. ** Or, in other words, I am strongly disagreeing that "intelligence is separated from language understanding". I believe that language understanding is the necessary tool that intelligence is built with since it is what puts the *contents* of intelligence (i.e. the domain model) into intelligence . Trying to build an intelligence without language understanding is like trying to build it with just machine language or by using only observable data points rather than trying to build those things into more complex entities like third-, fourth-, and fifth-generation programming languages instead of machine language and/or knowledge instead of just data points. BTW -- Please note, however, that the above does not imply that I believe that NLU is the place to start in developing AGI. Quite the contrary -- NLU rests upon such a large domain model that I believe that it is counter-productive to start there. I believe that we need to star with limited domains and learn about language, internal models, and grounding without brittleness in tractable domains before attempting to extend that knowledge to larger domains. ----- Original Message ----- From: David Hart <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sunday, October 19, 2008 5:30 AM Subject: Re: AW: [agi] Re: Defining AGI 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 | <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now> Archives <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/> | <https://www.listbox.com/member/?&;> Modify Your Subscription <http://www.listbox.com> _____ agi | <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now> Archives <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/> | <https://www.listbox.com/member/?&; 7> Modify Your Subscription <http://www.listbox.com> ------------------------------------------- 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
