On 4/8/2021 12:38 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
Hi Telmo,
Thank you for these links, they are very helpful in articulating the
problem. I think you are right about there being some connection
between communication of qualia and the symbol grounding problem.
I used to think there were two kinds of knowledge:
1. Third-person sharable knowledge: information that can be shared
and communicated through books, like the population of Paris, or
the height of Mount Everest
2. First-person knowledge: information that must be felt or
experienced first hand, emotions, feelings, the pain of a bee
sting, the smell of a rose
But now I am wondering if the idea of third-person sharable knowledge
is an illusion. The string encoding the height of Mount Everest is
meaningless if you have no framework for understanding physical
spaces, units of length, spatial extents, and the symbology of
numbers. All of that information has to be unpacked, and eventually
processed into some thought that relates to a basis of conscious
experience and understanding of heights and sizes. Even size is a
meaningless term when attempting to compare relative sizes between two
universes, so in that sense it must be tied somehow back to the subject.
There also seem to be counter-examples to a clear divide between
first- and third-person knowledge. For example, is the redness of red
really incommunicable between two synesthesiacs who both see the
number *5* as red? If everyone in the world had such synesthesia,
would we still think book knowledge could not communicate the redness
of red? In this case, what makes redness communicable is the shared
processing between the brains of the synesthesiacs, their brains
process the symbol in the same way.
I think you exaggerate the problem. Consider how bats "see" by sonar.
I think this is quite communicable to humans by analogies. And
submarines have sonar which produces images on screens. Is redness
communicable? My father who was red/green color blind had to guess at
the color of traffic lights or just watch other cars when he first
started to drive around 1928. But he understood the concept of color
because he could tell blue from red/green. And later, traffic engineers
adjust the spectrum of traffic lights so that he could tell the
difference (they also started to put the red at the top).
Brent
More comments below:
On Thu, Apr 8, 2021 at 11:11 AM Telmo Menezes <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hi Jason,
I believe that you are alluding to what is known in Cognitive
Science as the "Symbol Grounding Problem":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol_grounding_problem
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol_grounding_problem>
My intuition goes in the same direction as yours, that of
"procedural semantics". Furthermore, I am inclined to believe that
language is an emergent feature of computational processes with
self-replication. From signaling between unicellular organisms all
the way up to human language.
That is interesting. I do think there is something self-defining about
the meaning of processes. Something that multiplies two inputs can
always be said to be multiplying. The meaning of the operation is then
grounded in the function and processes of that process, which is made
unambiguous. The multiplication process could not be confused with
addition or subtraction. This is in contrast to a N-bit string on a
piece of paper, which could be interpreted in at least 2^N ways (or
perhaps even an infinite number of ways, if you consider what function
is applied to that bit string).
Luc Steels has some really interesting work exploring this sort of
idea, with his evolutionary language games:
https://csl.sony.fr/wp-content/themes/sony/uploads/pdf/steels-12c.pdf
<https://csl.sony.fr/wp-content/themes/sony/uploads/pdf/steels-12c.pdf>
Evolving systems that can communicate amongst themselves seems to be a
fruitful way to explore these issues. Has anyone attempted to take
simple examples, like computer simulated evolved versions of robots
playing soccer, and add in a layer that lets each player emit and
receive arbitrary signals from other players? I would expect there
would be strong evolutionary pressures for learning to communicate
things like "I see the ball", "I'm about to take a shot", etc. to
other teammates.
I have been working a lot with language these days. I and my
co-author (Camille Roth) developed a formalism called Semantic
Hypergraphs, which is an attempt to represent natural language in
structures that are akin to typed lambda-calculus:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.10784 <https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.10784>
One curiosity is that all human languages appear to be "Turing
complete" in the sense that we can use natural language to describe
and define any finite process. I don't know how significant this is
though, as in general it is pretty easy to achieve Turing complete
languages.
I think the central problem with "Mary the super-scientist
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument>" is our brains, in
general, don't have a way to take received code/instructions and
process them accordingly. I think if our brains could do this, if we
could take book knowledge and use it to build neural structures for
processing information in specified ways, then Mary could learn what
it is like to see red without red light ever hitting her retina. But
such flexibility in the brain would make us vulnerable to "mind
viruses" that spread by words or symbols. Modern computers clearly
demarcate <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_bit> executable and
non-executable memory to limit similar dangers.
This might also explain the apparent third-person / first-person
distinction. We can communicate through language any Turing machine,
and understand the functioning of that machine and processing in a
third person way, but without re-wiring ourselves, we have no way to
perceive it in a direct first-person way.
Here's the Python library that implements these ideas:
http://graphbrain.net/ <http://graphbrain.net/>
Very cool!
So far we use modern machine learning to parse natural language
into this representation, and then take advantage of the
regularity of the structures to automatically identify stuff in
text corpora for the purpose of computational social science research.
Something I dream of, and intend to explore at some point, is to
attempt to go beyond the parser and actually "execute the code",
and thus try to close the loop with the idea of procedural semantics.
I have often wondered, if an alien race discovered an english
dictionary (containing no pictures) would there be enough internal
consistency and information present in that dictionary to work out all
the meaning? I have the feeling that because there is enough
redundancy in it, together with a shared heritage of evolving in the
same physical universe, there is some hope that they could, but it
might involve a massive computational process to bootstrap. Once they
make some headway towards a correct interpretation of the words,
however, I think it will end up confirming itself as a correct
understanding, much like the end stages of solving a Sudoku puzzle
become easier and self-confirming of the correctness of the solution.
Is this the problem you are attempting to solve with the semantic
hyper graphs/graph brain, or that such graphs could one day solve?
Jason
Am Mi, 31. Mär 2021, um 17:58, schrieb Jason Resch:
I was thinking about what aspects of conscious experience are
communicable and which are not, and I realized all communication
relies on some pre-existing shared framework.
It's not only things like "red" that are meaningless to someone
whose never seen it, but likewise things like spatial extent and
dimensionslity would likewise be incommunicable to someone who
had no experience with moving in, or through, space.
Even communicating quantities requires a pre-existing and common
system of units and measures.
So all communication (inputs/outputs) consist of meaningless but
strings. It is only when a bit string is combined with some
processing that meaning can be shared. The reason we can't
communicate "red" to someone whose never seen it is we would need
to transmit a description of the processing done by our brains in
order to share what red means to oneself.
So in summary, I wonder if anything is communicabke, not just
qualia, but anything at all, when there's not already common
processing systems between the sender and receiver, of the
information.
Jason
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