Re: [agi] The Edge: The Neurology of Self-Awareness by VS Ramachandran
I like the idea that self-awareness emerges as a result of a utility designed to model other minds. After reading this article, I began thinking about it and some of its implications. I started thinking about language. So I have a little thought experiment I thought I would share. Suppose somewhere in our minds we have some module for learning words; maybe it looks at the state of other modules (the rest of the mind) and then tries to find correlations between the module states and words that it has heard. Over time, it might notice that the activation of certain systems could be correlated to the word 'happy', whereas output from the visual system could be correlated with 'red', or something similar. There's nothing new here so far. But then I wondered about personal pronouns, like 'he', 'she', and 'I'. So I wonder, if what goes on in our heads is even remotely like what was outlined above, would young children learning language have difficulties using the 'I' pronoun? I mean, it's just output from the 'person modeling module', isn't? Maybe they get confused and refer to themselvs as 'he' or 'she' or even by their names (kind of like a cartoon caveman - Grog no like!). Eventually the child in question would learn to only use say 'I' under very special conditions. I don't have any experience with child development or linguistics. Does anyone know of any data that could back this prediction up or disprove it? Does it even sound reasonable to anybody else? Josh Marlow On 1/9/07, Benjamin Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Interesting speculations on the origin of the self... ben From today's Edge: V.S. Ramachandran on The Neurology of Self-Awareness I suggest that self awareness is simply using mirror neurons for looking at myself as if someone else is look at me (the word me encompassing some of my brain processes, as well). [see below] http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran07/ramachandran07_index.html THE NEUROLOGY OF SELF-AWARENESS What is the self? How does the activity of neurons give rise to the sense of being a conscious human being? Even this most ancient of philosophical problems, I believe, will yield to the methods of empirical science. It now seems increasingly likely that the self is not a holistic property of the entire brain; it arises from the activity of specific sets of interlinked brain circuits. But we need to know which circuits are critically involved and what their functions might be. It is the turning inward aspect of the self — its recursiveness — that gives it its peculiar paradoxical quality. It has been suggested by Horace Barlow, Nick Humphrey, David Premack and Marvin Minsky (among others) that consciousness may have evolved primarily in a social context. Minsky speaks of a second parallel mechanism that has evolved in humans to create representations of earlier representations and Humphrey has argued that our ability to introspect may have evolved specifically to construct meaningful models of other peoples minds in order to predict their behavior. I feel jealous in order to understand what jealousy feels like in someone else — a short cut to predicting that persons behavior. Here I develop these arguments further. If I succeed in seeing any further it is by standing on the shoulders of these giants. Specifically, I suggest that other awareness may have evolved first and then counterintutively, as often happens in evolution, the same ability was exploited to model ones own mind — what one calls self awareness. I will also suggest that a specific system of neurons called mirror neurons are involved in this ability. Finally I discuss some clinical examples to illustrate these ideas and make some testable predictions. There are many aspects of self. It has a sense of unity despite the multitude of sense impressions and beliefs. In addition it has a sense of continuity in time, of being in control of its actions (free will), of being anchored in a body, a sense of its worth, dignity and mortality (or immortality). Each of these aspects of self may be mediated by different centers in different parts of the brain and its only for convenience that we lump them together in a single word. As noted earlier there is one aspect of self that seems stranger than all the others — the fact that it is aware of itself. I would like to suggest that groups of neurons called mirror neurons are critically involved in this ability. The discovery of mirror neurons was made G. Rizzolati, V Gallase and I Iaccoboni while recording from the brains of monkeys performed certain goal-directed voluntary actions. For instance when the monkey reached for a peanut a certain neuron in its pre motor cortex ( in the frontal lobes) would fire. Another neuron would fire when the monkey pushed a button, a third neuron when he pulled a lever. The existence of such Command neurons that control voluntary movements has been known for decades. Amazingly, a subset of these neurons had an
Re: [agi] Project proposal: MindPixel 2
On 1/14/07, Chuck Esterbrook [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: * Would it support separate domains/modules? I didn't realize the importance of this point at first. Indeed, what we regard as common sense may be highly subjective as it involves matters such as human values, ideology or religion. So the differentiation of subsets is desirable. We may maintain a core body that is really uncontroversial (eg everyday physics), and then let users create their own personalities as additional modules / communities. YKY - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] Project proposal: MindPixel 2
I think all these are excellent suggestions. On 13/01/07, Joel Pitt [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Some comments/suggestions: * I think such a project should make the data public domain. Ignore silly ideas like giving be shares in the knowledge or whatever. It just complicates things. If the project is really strapped for cash later, then either use ad revenue or look for research funding (although I don't see much cost except for initial development of the system and web hosting). * Whenever people want to add a new statement, have them evaluate two existing statements as well. Don't make the evaluation true/false, use a slider so the user can decide how true it is (even better, have a xy chart with one axis true/false and the other how sure the user is - this would be useful in the case of some obscure fact on quantum physics since not all of us have the answer). * Emphasize the community aspect of the database. Allow people to have profiles and list the number of statements evaluated and submitted (also how true the statements they submit are judged). Allow people to form teams. Allow teams to extract a subset of the data which represents only the facts they've submitted and evaluated (perhaps this could be an extra feature available to sponsors?) * Although Lojban would be great to use, not many people are proficient it (relative to english), we could be idealistic and suggest that everyone learn lojban before submitting statements, but that would just shrink the user base and kill the community aspect. An alternative might be to allow statements in both languages to submitted (Hell, why not allow ANY language as long as it is tagged with what language it is). * An idea for keeping the community alive would be to focus on a particular topic each week, and run competitions between teams/individuals and award stars to their profile or something. * Instead of making people come up with brand new statements everytime, have a mode where the system randomly selects phrases from somewhere like wikipedia (some times this will produce stupid statements, and allow the user to indicate as such). I think it could be done and made quite fun. Don't just focus on the AI guys, most of us don't have that much spare time. Focus at the bored at work market. Actually going through and thinking about this has made me quite enthused about it. Keep me posted on how it pans out. If I didn't have 10 other projects and my PhD to do I'd volunteer to code it. -- -Joel Unless you try to do something beyond what you have mastered, you will never grow. -C.R. Lawton - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303 - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] The Edge: The Neurology of Self-Awareness by VS Ramachandran
J Marlow wrote: I like the idea that self-awareness emerges as a result of a utility designed to model other minds. After reading this article, I began thinking about it and some of its implications. I started thinking about language. So I have a little thought experiment I thought I would share. Suppose somewhere in our minds we have some module for learning words; maybe it looks at the state of other modules (the rest of the mind) and then tries to find correlations between the module states and words that it has heard. Over time, it might notice that the activation of certain systems could be correlated to the word 'happy', whereas output from the visual system could be correlated with 'red', or something similar. There's nothing new here so far. But then I wondered about personal pronouns, like 'he', 'she', and 'I'. So I wonder, if what goes on in our heads is even remotely like what was outlined above, would young children learning language have difficulties using the 'I' pronoun? I mean, it's just output from the 'person modeling module', isn't? Maybe they get confused and refer to themselvs as 'he' or 'she' or even by their names (kind of like a cartoon caveman - Grog no like!). Eventually the child in question would learn to only use say 'I' under very special conditions. I don't have any experience with child development or linguistics. Does anyone know of any data that could back this prediction up or disprove it? Does it even sound reasonable to anybody else? Josh Marlow Brief notes: The word module is conventionally known as the lexicon in Cog Sci. There may be several of these, specialized to such things as phonology, etc. Semantic lexicon is hypothesized, but again it probably is a conjunction of several modules. The field of psycholinguistics has a *lot* to say about this stuff (Try Trevor Harley's introductory textbook on the subject for a starter). Children do not start by using 3rd person pronouns. Exception: autism. Re. learning word meanings by correlation the way you suggest: if you mean to use the word correlation in a very generalized sense then this is true but does not say very much because the varieties of correlation involved are limitless -- you would only be describing the entire body of research in language learning. If you mean correlation in a narrow technical sense, it won't work: cannot just wait for two concurrently active percepts and then associate them, then hope that the system will become smart . too much else needs to happen. For example, if the child hears hot! which of the thousands of percepts currently active gets associated? Making the right one become the most salient is THE problem of getting a system to be smart, and soldering up the connection from that salient one to the word hot then becomes a trivial bit of icing on the cake. More generally, the solving-the-icing-but-forgetting-the-cake problem is the bane of AI research. Happens all the time. Hope that helps. Richard Loosemore - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] Project proposal: MindPixel 2
--- Gabriel R [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Also, if you can think of any way to turn the knowledge-entry process into a fun game or competition, go for it. I've been told by a few people working on similar projects that making the knowledge-providing process engaging and fun for visitors ended up being a lot more important (and difficult) than they'd expected. Cyc has a game like this called FACTory at http://www.cyc.com/ It's purpose is to help refine its knowledge base. It presents statements and asks you to rate them as true, false, don't know or doesn't make sense. For example. - Most shirts are heavier than most appendixes. - Pages are typically located in HVAC Chem Bio facilities. - Terminals are typically located in studies. - People perform or are involved in paying a mortgage more frequenty than they perform or are involved in overbearing. - Most BTU dozer blades are wider than most T-64 medium tanks. The game exposes Cyc's shortcomings pretty quickly. Cyc seems to lack a world model and a language model. Sentences seem to be constructed by relating common properties of unrelated objects. The set of common properties is fairly small: size, weight, cost, frequency (for events), containment, etc. There does not seem to be any sense that Cyc understands the purpose or function of objects. The result is that context is no help in disambiguating terms that have more than one meaning, such as appendix, page, or terminal. A language model would allow a more natural grammar, such as People pay mortgages more often than they are overbearing. This example also exposes the fallacy of logical inference. Inference allows you to draw conclusions such as this, but why would you? Inference is not a good model of human thought. A good model would compare related objects. It might ask instead whether people make mortgage payments more frequently than they receive paychecks. The game gives no hint that Cyc understands such relations. Cyc has millions of hand coded assertions. It has taken over 20 years to get this far, and it seems we are not even close. This seems to be a problem with every knowledge representation based on labeled graphs (frame-slot, first order logic, connectionist, expert system, etc). Using English words to label the elements of your data structure does not substitute for a language model. Also, this labeling tempts you to examine and update the knowledge manually. We should know by now that there is just too much data to do this. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
RE: [agi] SOTA
No, and it's a damn good thing it isn't. If it was we would be sentencing it to a mindless job with no time off, only to be disposed of when a better model comes out. We only want our AI's to be a smart as necessary to accomplish their jobs just as our cells and organs are. Limited conciousness or self-reflectivity may only be necessary in highly complex systems like computers where we may want them to recognize that they have a virus and take steps like searching for a digital vaccine to eliminate it without the owner even knowing it was there. Even in these cases we are only giving the system conciousness over one specific aspect of it's being. I would say that until we have software that can learn new free format information as we do and modify it's goal stack based upon that new information then we do not have a truly concious computer. _ From: Bob Mottram [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, January 12, 2007 9:45 AM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: [agi] SOTA Ah, but is a thermostat conscious ? :-) On 12/01/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.thermostatshop.com/ Not sure what you've been Googling on but here they are. There's even one you can call on the telephone If there's a market for this, then why can't I even buy a thermostat with a timer on it to turn the temperature down at night and up in the morning? The most basic home automation, which could have been built cheaply 30 years ago, is still, if available at all, so rare that I've never seen it. _ This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303 _ This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303 - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] SOTA
Well, there's no reason to stop at a purely utilitarian level. A high level of consciousness may be necessary for performing certain kinds of task, such as imagining someone's reaction to a particular event. On 14/01/07, Gary Miller [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: No, and it's a damn good thing it isn't. If it was we would be sentencing it to a mindless job with no time off, only to be disposed of when a better model comes out. We only want our AI's to be a smart as necessary to accomplish their jobs just as our cells and organs are. Limited conciousness or self-reflectivity may only be necessary in highly complex systems like computers where we may want them to recognize that they have a virus and take steps like searching for a digital vaccine to eliminate it without the owner even knowing it was there. Even in these cases we are only giving the system conciousness over one specific aspect of it's being. I would say that until we have software that can learn new free format information as we do and modify it's goal stack based upon that new information then we do not have a truly concious computer. -- *From:* Bob Mottram [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] *Sent:* Friday, January 12, 2007 9:45 AM *To:* agi@v2.listbox.com *Subject:* Re: [agi] SOTA Ah, but is a thermostat conscious ? :-) On 12/01/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.thermostatshop.com/ Not sure what you've been Googling on but here they are. There's even one you can call on the telephone If there's a market for this, then why can't I even buy a thermostat with a timer on it to turn the temperature down at night and up in the morning? The most basic home automation, which could have been built cheaply 30 years ago, is still, if available at all, so rare that I've never seen it. -- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303 -- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303 -- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303 - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] Project proposal: MindPixel 2
Another way to group the data might be to tease it out into dimensions of what, where, when and whom. There does seem to be some neurological evidence for this kind of categorization. Also, by indexing the data along these lines it allows you to some extent to make meaningful interpolations from similar but non-identical situations, or to imagine situations which are vaguely plausible based upon your past experience. On 14/01/07, YKY (Yan King Yin) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 1/14/07, Chuck Esterbrook [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: * Would it support separate domains/modules? I didn't realize the importance of this point at first. Indeed, what we regard as common sense may be highly subjective as it involves matters such as human values, ideology or religion. So the differentiation of subsets is desirable. We may maintain a core body that is really uncontroversial (eg everyday physics), and then let users create their own personalities as additional modules / communities. YKY -- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303 - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] Project proposal: MindPixel 2
I worked at Cycorp when the FACTory game was developed. The examples below do not reveal Cyc's knowledge of the assertions connecting these disparate concepts, rather most show that the argument constraints of the terms compared are rather overly generalized. The exception is the example Most BTU dozer blades are wider than most T-64 medium tanks. in which both concepts are specializations of Platform-Military. Download and examine concepts in OpenCyc and Cyc's world model (or lack thereof by your standards) will be readily apparent. You need ResearchCyc which has no license fee for research purposes, in order to evaluate its language model. -Steve - Original Message From: Matt Mahoney [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Sunday, January 14, 2007 3:14:07 PM Subject: Re: [agi] Project proposal: MindPixel 2 --- Gabriel R [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Also, if you can think of any way to turn the knowledge-entry process into a fun game or competition, go for it. I've been told by a few people working on similar projects that making the knowledge-providing process engaging and fun for visitors ended up being a lot more important (and difficult) than they'd expected. Cyc has a game like this called FACTory at http://www.cyc.com/ It's purpose is to help refine its knowledge base. It presents statements and asks you to rate them as true, false, don't know or doesn't make sense. For example. - Most shirts are heavier than most appendixes. - Pages are typically located in HVAC Chem Bio facilities. - Terminals are typically located in studies. - People perform or are involved in paying a mortgage more frequenty than they perform or are involved in overbearing. - Most BTU dozer blades are wider than most T-64 medium tanks. The game exposes Cyc's shortcomings pretty quickly. Cyc seems to lack a world model and a language model. Sentences seem to be constructed by relating common properties of unrelated objects. The set of common properties is fairly small: size, weight, cost, frequency (for events), containment, etc. There does not seem to be any sense that Cyc understands the purpose or function of objects. The result is that context is no help in disambiguating terms that have more than one meaning, such as appendix, page, or terminal. A language model would allow a more natural grammar, such as People pay mortgages more often than they are overbearing. This example also exposes the fallacy of logical inference. Inference allows you to draw conclusions such as this, but why would you? Inference is not a good model of human thought. A good model would compare related objects. It might ask instead whether people make mortgage payments more frequently than they receive paychecks. The game gives no hint that Cyc understands such relations. Cyc has millions of hand coded assertions. It has taken over 20 years to get this far, and it seems we are not even close. This seems to be a problem with every knowledge representation based on labeled graphs (frame-slot, first order logic, connectionist, expert system, etc). Using English words to label the elements of your data structure does not substitute for a language model. Also, this labeling tempts you to examine and update the knowledge manually. We should know by now that there is just too much data to do this. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303 Never miss an email again! Yahoo! Toolbar alerts you the instant new Mail arrives. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/toolbar/features/mail/ - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
