Mike, Your own thought processes only seem mysterious because you can't predict what you will think without actually thinking it. It's not just a property of the human brain, but of all Turing machines. No program can non-trivially model itself. (By model, I mean that P models Q if for any input x, P can compute the output Q(x). By non-trivial, I mean that P does something else besides just model Q. (Every program trivially models itself). The proof is that for P to non-trivially model Q requires K(P) > K(Q), where K is Kolmogorov complexity, because P needs a description of Q plus whatever else it does to make it non-trivial. It is obviously not possible for K(P) > K(P)).
So if you learned the associations A-B and B-C, then A will predict C. That is called "reasoning". Also, each concept is associated with thousands of other concepts, not just A-B. If you pick the strongest associated concept not previously activated, you get the semi-random thought chain you describe. You can demonstrate this with a word-word matrix M from a large text corpus, where M[i,j] is the degree to which the i'th word in the vocabulary is associated with the j'th word, as measured by the probability of finding both words near each other in the corpus. Thus, M[rain,wet] and M[wet,water] have high values because the words often appear in the same paragraph. Traversing related words in M gives you something similar to your free association chain like rain-wet-water-... -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] --- On Thu, 1/8/09, Mike Tintner <[email protected]> wrote: > From: Mike Tintner <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: [agi] The Smushaby of Flatway. > To: [email protected] > Date: Thursday, January 8, 2009, 3:54 PM > Matt:Free association is the basic way of recalling > memories. If you experience A followed by B, then the next > time you experience A you will think of (or predict) B. > Pavlov demonstrated this type of learning in animals in > 1927. > > Matt, > > You're not thinking your argument through. Look > carefully at my spontaneous > > "COW" - DOG - TAIL - CURRENT CRISIS - LOCAL VS > GLOBAL > THINKING - WHAT A NICE DAY - MUST GET ON- CANT SPEND MUCH > MORE TIME ON > THIS...." etc. etc" > > that's not A-B association. > > That's 1. A-B-C then 2. Gamma-Delta then 3. > Languages then 4. Number of Lines in Letters. > > IOW the brain is typically not only freely associating > *ideas* but switching freely across, and connecting, > radically different *domains* in any given chain of > association. [e.g above from Animals to Economics/Politics > to Weather to Personal Timetable] > > It can do this partly because > > a) single ideas have multiple, often massively mutiple, > idea/domain connections in the human brain, and allow one to > go off in any of multiple tangents/directions > b) humans have many things - and therefore multiple domains > - on their mind at the same time concurrently - and can > switch as above from the immediate subject to some other > pressing subject domain (e.g. from economics/politics > (local vs global) to the weather (what a nice day). > > If your "A-B, everything-is-memory-recall" thesis > were true, our chains-of-thought-association would be > largely repetitive, and the domain switches inevitable.. > > In fact, our chains (or networks) of free association and > domain-switching are highly creative, and each one is > typically, from a purely technical POV, novel and > surprising. (I have never connected TAIL and CURRENT CRISIS > before - though Animals and Politics yes. Nor have I > connected LOCAL VS GLOBAL THINKING before with WHAT A NICE > DAY and the weather). > > IOW I'm suggesting, the natural mode of human thought - > and our continuous streams of association - are creative. > And achieving such creativity is the principal problem/goal > of AGI. > > So maybe it's worth taking 20 secs. of time - producing > your own chain-of-free-association starting say with > "MAHONEY" and going on for another 10 or so items > - and trying to figure out how the result could.possibly be > the narrow kind of memory-recall you're arguing for. > It's an awful lot to ask for, but could you possibly try > it, analyse it and report back? > > [Ben claims to have heard every type of argument I make > before, (somewhat like your A-B memory claim), so perhaps > he can tell me where he's read before about the Freely > Associative, Freely Domain Switching nature of human thought > - I'd be interested to follow up on it]. ------------------------------------------- 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=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
