Ben,
Yeah, I'd heavily recommend it. I don't know anything like Koestler for
setting out the general importance of the hierarchical principle. And I
didn't do it justice, because it *is* two-way. It's not just about triggers
(or your keys) acting downwards, through a whole "holarchy" of "holons" -
each level being more complex. It's also about "filters" - how, working
upwards, the system filters and strips down the information that is sent to
the top. This works both in terms of the conscious self within the
individual, and the CEO within the organization - each is "briefed" on the
very complex scenes that have been represented and/or dealt with at the much
more complex sensory and/or motor level (or level of organizational
subordinates). So the hierarchy is both concretising (downwards) and
abstracting (upwards).
It is central to this idea, that each level is at once command-driven,
subject to its own canon of rules, but has a certain freedom.
The idea applies v. well to the relation of conscious self/mind and
unconscious mind,(which, AFAIK, most AI thinking doesn't). At first, in
acquiring new skills, the whole hierarchy, incl. the conscious self, is
involved in mastering new movements. Gradually, repetitive actions and
associations become automatic and are sloughed off to lower levels. Whenever
the routines are incapable of dealing with material/situations, the
conscious self (or the CEO) is brought in.
There's a lot more...
Ben:
You know, I read that book 25 years ago ... maybe I should look at it
again...
However, my point was definitely not "the hierarchical principle as
the organizing principle of life"... that is a rather different point.
If any example conveys my point clearly, it would be the "glocal
Hopfield net", which is a toy computational model illustrating the
glocality principle (and which I'll have a whole paper on, sometime).
The fact that a symbolic command can trigger a large set of actions
isn't *quite* the point. But a military example might work better
than the one I gave. The way to give a military example might be to
refer to War and Peace, where General Kutuzov proposes to just let the
army self-organize into its own battle patterns, rather than providing
top-down control. This is sorta large-scale guerilla warfare, right?
The opposite would be something like Operation Desert Storm, which was
carefully orchestrated and planned (in spite of some errors e.g.
deaths by friendly fire), so that the individual actors were largely
doing what the software told them to do. In Kutuzov's battle, the
knowledge of the military plan was contained in the army as a whole;
in Desert Storm, the knowledge was contained in the central planning
software and the minds of the relevant generalized (hence localized
from the view of the whole army). In a glocal approach there would be
central planning *and* distributed, self-organized activity, and they
would be coordinated together dynamically and effectively, which is
what the military realizes it needs to achieve in future in order to
combine rapid, flexible adaptivity with global coordination.
ben
On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 5:04 AM, Mike Tintner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
Ben,
Have you read Koestler's The Ghost in the Machine? You seem to be
reaching
in your post for what he sets out there - albeit v. loosely - namely the
hierarchical principle as the organizing principle of life, both of
organisms and of societies (and perhaps one can add machines). You talk
of
representation being organized in terms of a key linking to - or you
could
say, "opening" - a map - a very simple unit opening up a complex set of
units; he talks in terms of triggers.- simple commands or signals
releasing
complex action patterns. This underlies not just knowledge representation
and movement and all goal-directed action but also socially organized
action. Your social example confused me. It seems easier to me to think
in
terms of how, in social units, the simple, typically symbolic commands of
one individual set off extremely complex action patterns by the whole
social
unit or organization. A president says "invade Iraq" and a little later a
vast army of 150,000 with all its machinery is elaborating his command.
Our machines also are designed in terms of simple switches, or key
mechanisms, setting off whole elaborate complexes of action.
.
Ben:
A semi-technical essay on the global/local (aka glocal) nature of
memory is linked to from here
http://multiverseaccordingtoben.blogspot.com/
I wrote this a long while ago but just got around to posting it now...
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agi
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--
Ben Goertzel, PhD
CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC
Director of Research, SIAI
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"The empires of the future are the empires of the mind."
-- Sir Winston Churchill
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agi
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