Re: [agi] The Smushaby of Flatway.
On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 10:41 AM, Ed Porter ewpor...@msn.com wrote: Ed Porter This is certainly not true of a Novamente-type system, at least as I conceive of it being built on the type of massively parallel, highly interconnected hardware that will be available to AI within 3-7 years. Such a system would be hierarchical in both the compositional and generalizational dimensions, and the computation would be taking place by importance weighted probabilisitic spreading activation, constraint relaxation, and k-winner take all competition across multiple layers of these hierarchies, so the decision making would not funnel all reasoning through a single narrowly focused process any more that human though processes do. If a decision is to be made, it makes computational sense to have some selection process that focuses attention on a selected one of multiple possible candidate actions or though. If that is the type of funneling that you object to, you are largely objecting to decision making itself. I have been busy and I just started reading the remarks on this thread. I want to reply to Ed's comment since his remarks seemed to be focused in on what I said. (And I was able to understand what he was talking about!) Parallel methods do not in of themselves constitute what I call structural reasoning. I object to the funneling and flat methods of reasoning itself. Although I do not have any new alternatives to add to logic, fuzzy logic, probability, genetic algorithms and various network decision processes, my objection is directed toward the narrow focus on the fundamentals of those decision making processes, or to the creative (but somewhat dubious) steps taken to force the data to conform to the inadequacies of (what I called) flat decision processes. For instance, when it is discovered that probabilistic reasoning isn't quite good enough for advanced nlp, many hopefuls will rediscover the creative 'solution' of using orthogonal multidimensional 'measures' of semantic distance. Instead of following their intuition and coming up with ways to make the reasoning seem more natural, they first turn toward a more fanciful method by which they try to force the corpus of natural language to conform to their previously decision to use a simple metric. My recommendation would be to first try to begin thinking about how natural reasoning might be better structured to solve those problems before you start distorting the data. For an example, reasons are often used in natural reasoning. A reason can be good or bad. A reason can provide causal information about the reasoning but even a good reason may only shed light on information incidental to the reasoning. The value of a reason can be relative to both the reasoning and the nature of the supplied reason itself. My point here is that the relation of reason to reasoning is significant (especially when they work) although it can be very complicated. But even though the use of a reason is not simple, notice how natural and familiar it seems. Example: 'I do this because I want to!' Not a good reason to explain why I am doing something unless you are (for instance) curious about the emotional issues behind my actions. Another example: I advocate this theory because it seems natural! A much better reason for the advocacy. It tells you something about what is motivating me to make the advocacy but it also tells you something about the theory as it is being advocated. There are other kinds of structures to reasoning that can be considered as well. This was only one. I realized during the past few days, that most reasoning in a contemporary AGI program would be ongoing and so yes the reasoning would be more structured than I originally thought. (I wouldn't have written my original message at all except that I was a little more off than usual that night for some reason.) However, even though ongoing reasoning does represent some additional complexity to the process of reasoning, the fact that structural reasoning itself is not being discussed means that it is being downplayed and even ignored. So you have the curious situation where the less natural metric of semantic distance being enthusiastically offered while a more complete examination of the potential of using natural reasons in reasoning is almost totally ignored. So while I believe that modifications and extensions of logic, categorical systems, probability, and network decision processes will be used to eventually create more powerful AGI programs, I don't think the contemporary efforts to produce such advanced AGI will be successful without the conscious consideration and use of structural reasoning. Jim Bromer --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription:
Re: [agi] What Must a World Be That a Humanlike Intelligence May Develop In It?
What about vibration? We have specialized mechanoreceptors to detect vibration (actually vibration and pressure - presumably there's processing to separate the two). It's vibration that lets us feel fine texture, via the stick-slip friction between fingertip and object. On a related note, even a very fine powder of very low friction feels different to water - how can you capture the sensation of water using beads and blocks of a reasonably large size? -- Nathan Cook --- 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=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] Looking Into Your Mind
I don't know if anyone mentioned this before or not. Reading your mind using brain imaging. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/12/31/60minutes/main4694713.shtml http://www.ccbi.cmu.edu/home_set.htm There should be references to other researchers in the story. I watched it on tv but I haven't reread the story. Jim Bromer --- 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=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] What Must a World Be That a Humanlike Intelligence May Develop In It?
On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 4:27 PM, Nathan Cook nathan.c...@gmail.com wrote: What about vibration? We have specialized mechanoreceptors to detect vibration (actually vibration and pressure - presumably there's processing to separate the two). It's vibration that lets us feel fine texture, via the stick-slip friction between fingertip and object. Actually, letting beads vibrate at various frequencies would seem perfectly reasonable ... and could lead to interesting behaviors in sets of flexibly coupled beads. I think this would be a good addition to the model, thanks! On a related note, even a very fine powder of very low friction feels different to water - how can you capture the sensation of water using beads and blocks of a reasonably large size? The objective of a CogDevWorld such as BlocksNBeadsWorld is explicitly **not** to precisely simulate the sensations of being in the real world. My question to you is: What important cognitive ability is drastically more easily developable given a world that contains a distinction between fluids and various sorts of bead-conglomerates? -- Ben G --- 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=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Identity abstraction
Thanks for the more specific answer. It was the most illuminating of the ones I've gotten. I realize that this isn't really the right list for questions about human subjects experiments; just thought I'd give it a try. Richard Loosemore wrote: Harry Chesley wrote: On 1/9/2009 9:45 AM, Richard Loosemore wrote: There are certainly experiments that might address some of your concerns, but I am afraid you will have to acquire a general knowledge of what is known, first, to be able to make sense of what they might tell you. There is nothing that can be plucked and delivered as a direct answer. I was not asking for a complete answer. I was asking for experiments that shed light on the area. I don't expect a mature answer, only more food for thought. Your answer that there are such experiments, but you're not going to tell me what they are is not a useful one. Don't worry about whether I can digest the experimental context. Maybe I know more than you assume I do. What I am trying to say is that you will find answers that are partially relevant to your question scattered across about a third of the chapters of any comprehensive introduction to cognitive psychology. And then, at a deeper level, you will find something of relevance in numerous more specialized documents. But they are so scattered that I could not possibly start to produce a comprehensive list! For example, the easiest things to mention are object perception within a developmental psychology framework (see a dev psych textbook for entire chapters on that); the psycholgy of concepts will involve numerous experiments that require judgements of whether objects are same or different (but in each case the experiment will not be focussed on answering the direct question you might be asking); the question of how concepts are represented sometimes involves the dialectic between the prototype and exemplar camps (see book by Smith and Medin), which partially touches on the question; there are discussions in the connectionist literature about the problem of type-token discrimination (see Norman's chapter at the end of the second PDP volume - McClelland and Rumelhart 1986/7); then there is neurospychology of naming... see books on psychololinguistics like the one written by Trevor Harley for a comprehensive introduction to that area); there are also vast numbers of studies to do with recognition of abstract concepts using neural nets (you could pick up three or four papers that I wrote in the 1990s which center on the problem of extracting the spelled for of words using phoneme clusters if you look at the publications section of my website, susaro.com, but there are thousands of others). Then, you could also wait for my own textbook (in preparation) which treats the formation of concepts and the mechanisms of abstraction from the Molecular perspective. These are just examples picked at random. none of them answer your question, they just give you pieces of the puzzle, for you to assemble into a half-working answer after a couple of years of study ;-). Anyone who knew the field would say, in response to your inquiry, But what exactly do you mean by the question?, and they would say this because your question touches upon about six or seven major areas of inquiry, in the most general possible terms. Richard Loosemore --- 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/?; Powered by Listbox: 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=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] The Smushaby of Flatway.
Mike Tintner wrote: Richard, You missed Mike Tintner's explanation . . . . Mark, Right So you think maybe what we've got here is a radical influx of globally entangled free-association bosons? Richard, Q.E.D. Well done. Now tell me how you connected my ridiculous [or however else you might want to style it] argument with your argument re bosons - OTHER than by free association? What *prior* set of associations in your mind, or prior, preprogrammed set of rules, what logicomathematical thinking enabled you to form that connection? (And it would be a good idea to apply it to your previous joke re Blue - because they must be *generally applicable* principles) And what prior principles enabled you to spontaneously and creatively form the precise association of radical influx of globally entagled free-association bosons - to connect RADICAL INFLUX with GLOBALLY ENTANGLED ..and FREE ASSOCIATION and BOSONS. You were being v. funny, right? But humour is domain-switching (which you do multiple times above) and that's what you/AGI can't do or explain computationally. *** Ironically, before I saw your post I had already written (and shelved) a P.S. Here it is: P.S. Note BTW - because I'm confident you're probably still thinking what's that weird nutter on about? what's this got to do with AGI? - the very best evidence for my claim. That claim is now that the brain is * potentially infinitely domain-switching on both a) a basic level, and b) a meta-level - i.e. capable of forming endless new connections/associations on a higher level too and so, forming infinite new modes of reasoning, ( new *ways* of associating ideas as well as new association) The very best evidence are *logic and mathematics themselves*. For logic and mathematics ceaselessly produce new branches of themselves. New logics. New numbers, New kinds of geometry. *New modes of reasoning.* And an absolutely major problem for logic and mathematics (and current computation) is that they *cannot explain themselves* - cannot explain how these new modes of reasoning are generated/ There are no logical and mathematical or other formal ways of explaining these new branches. Rational numbers cannot be used to deduce irrational numbers and thence imaginary numbers. Trigonometry cannot be used to deduce calculus. Euclidean geometry cannot be used to deduce riemannian to deduce topology. And so on. Aristotelian logic cannot explain fuzzy logic cannot explain PLN. Logicomathematical modes of reasoning are *not* generated logicomathematically.but creatively-as both Ben, I think, and certainly Franklin have acknowledged. And clearly the brain is capable of forming infinitely new logics and mathematics - infinite new forms of reasoning - by *non-logicomathematical*/*nonformal* means. By, I suggest, free association among other means. It's easy to make cheap, snide comments. But can either of you actually engage directly with the problem of domain-switching, and argue constructively about particular creative problems and thinking - using actual evidence? I've seen literally no instances from either of you (or indeed, though this may at first seem surprising and may need a little explanation - anyone in the AI community). let's take an actual example of good creative thinking happening on the fly - and what I've called directed free association - It's by one Richard Loosemore. You as well as others thought pretty creatively about the problem of the engram a while back. Here's the transcript of that thinking - as I said, good creative thinking, really trying to have new ideas (as opposed to just being snide here).: Now perhaps you can tell me what prior *logic* or programming produced the flow of your own ideas here? How do you get from one to the next? Richard: Now you're just trying to make me think ;-). 1. Okay, try this. 2. [heck, you don't have to: I am just playing with ideas here...] 3. The methylation pattern has not necessarily been shown to *only* store information in a distributed pattern of activation - the jury's out on that one (correct me if I'm wrong). 4.5 Suppose that the methylation end caps are just being used as a way station for some mechanism whose *real* goal is to make modifications to some patterns in the junk DNA. 6. So, here I am suggesting that the junk DNA of any particular neuron is being used to code for large numbers of episodic memories (one memory per DNA strand, say), with each neuron being used as a redundant store of many episodes. 7. The same episode is stored in multiple neurons, but each copy is complete. 8. When we observe changes in the methylation patterns, perhaps these are just part of the transit mechanism, not the final destination for the pattern. 9. To put it in the language that Greg Bear would use, the endcaps were just part of the radio system.
Re: [agi] Identity abstraction
Harry Chesley wrote: Thanks for the more specific answer. It was the most illuminating of the ones I've gotten. I realize that this isn't really the right list for questions about human subjects experiments; just thought I'd give it a try. In general no. But that is my specialty. Richard Loosemore Richard Loosemore wrote: Harry Chesley wrote: On 1/9/2009 9:45 AM, Richard Loosemore wrote: There are certainly experiments that might address some of your concerns, but I am afraid you will have to acquire a general knowledge of what is known, first, to be able to make sense of what they might tell you. There is nothing that can be plucked and delivered as a direct answer. I was not asking for a complete answer. I was asking for experiments that shed light on the area. I don't expect a mature answer, only more food for thought. Your answer that there are such experiments, but you're not going to tell me what they are is not a useful one. Don't worry about whether I can digest the experimental context. Maybe I know more than you assume I do. What I am trying to say is that you will find answers that are partially relevant to your question scattered across about a third of the chapters of any comprehensive introduction to cognitive psychology. And then, at a deeper level, you will find something of relevance in numerous more specialized documents. But they are so scattered that I could not possibly start to produce a comprehensive list! For example, the easiest things to mention are object perception within a developmental psychology framework (see a dev psych textbook for entire chapters on that); the psycholgy of concepts will involve numerous experiments that require judgements of whether objects are same or different (but in each case the experiment will not be focussed on answering the direct question you might be asking); the question of how concepts are represented sometimes involves the dialectic between the prototype and exemplar camps (see book by Smith and Medin), which partially touches on the question; there are discussions in the connectionist literature about the problem of type-token discrimination (see Norman's chapter at the end of the second PDP volume - McClelland and Rumelhart 1986/7); then there is neurospychology of naming... see books on psychololinguistics like the one written by Trevor Harley for a comprehensive introduction to that area); there are also vast numbers of studies to do with recognition of abstract concepts using neural nets (you could pick up three or four papers that I wrote in the 1990s which center on the problem of extracting the spelled for of words using phoneme clusters if you look at the publications section of my website, susaro.com, but there are thousands of others). Then, you could also wait for my own textbook (in preparation) which treats the formation of concepts and the mechanisms of abstraction from the Molecular perspective. These are just examples picked at random. none of them answer your question, they just give you pieces of the puzzle, for you to assemble into a half-working answer after a couple of years of study ;-). Anyone who knew the field would say, in response to your inquiry, But what exactly do you mean by the question?, and they would say this because your question touches upon about six or seven major areas of inquiry, in the most general possible terms. Richard Loosemore --- 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/?; Powered by Listbox: 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/?; Powered by Listbox: 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=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] What Must a World Be That a Humanlike Intelligence May Develop In It?
On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 11:02 PM, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org wrote: On a related note, even a very fine powder of very low friction feels different to water - how can you capture the sensation of water using beads and blocks of a reasonably large size? The objective of a CogDevWorld such as BlocksNBeadsWorld is explicitly **not** to precisely simulate the sensations of being in the real world. My question to you is: What important cognitive ability is drastically more easily developable given a world that contains a distinction between fluids and various sorts of bead-conglomerates? The objection is not valid in equating beads with dry powder. Certain forms of adhesion of the beads form a good approximation to fluids. You can have your hand wet with sticky beads etc. The model feels underspecified to me, but I'm OK with that, the ideas conveyed. It doesn't feel fair to insist there's no fluid dynamics modeled though ;-) Best regards. --- 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=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] What Must a World Be That a Humanlike Intelligence May Develop In It?
2009/1/10 Lukasz Stafiniak lukst...@gmail.com: On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 11:02 PM, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org wrote: On a related note, even a very fine powder of very low friction feels different to water - how can you capture the sensation of water using beads and blocks of a reasonably large size? The objective of a CogDevWorld such as BlocksNBeadsWorld is explicitly **not** to precisely simulate the sensations of being in the real world. My question to you is: What important cognitive ability is drastically more easily developable given a world that contains a distinction between fluids and various sorts of bead-conglomerates? The objection is not valid in equating beads with dry powder. Certain forms of adhesion of the beads form a good approximation to fluids. You can have your hand wet with sticky beads etc. This would require at least a two-factor adhesion-cohesion model. But Ben has a good rejoinder to my comment. -- Nathan Cook --- 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=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] What Must a World Be That a Humanlike Intelligence May Develop In It?
The model feels underspecified to me, but I'm OK with that, the ideas conveyed. It doesn't feel fair to insist there's no fluid dynamics modeled though ;-) Yes, the next step would be to write out detailed equations for the model. I didn't do that in the paper because I figured that would be a fairly empty exercise unless I also implemented some kind of simple simulation of the model. With this sort of thing, it's easy to write down equations that look good, but one doesn't really know if they make sense till one's run some simulations, done some parameter tuning, etc. Which seems like a quite fun exercise, but I just didn't get to it yet... actually it would be sensible to do this together with some nice visualization... ben --- 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=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] What Must a World Be That a Humanlike Intelligence May Develop In It?
It turns out that nerve cells require physical vibrations to work correctly. An odd discovery to say the least. But movement of an electrostatic charge in a standing electromagnetic polarization field may be useful for measuring the vibrations of odor molecules for the odor system. Part of an odor molecule moves in an out of the pore of a nerve cell. An odor signal then would be a summation of averages of the different parts being stored on a standing wave pattern of about 30 hertz. You can duplicate any odor if you can get the same ratio of the small parts of the original molecule. - Original Message - From: Nathan Cook To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Saturday, January 10, 2009 4:27 PM Subject: Re: [agi] What Must a World Be That a Humanlike Intelligence May Develop In It? What about vibration? We have specialized mechanoreceptors to detect vibration (actually vibration and pressure - presumably there's processing to separate the two). It's vibration that lets us feel fine texture, via the stick-slip friction between fingertip and object. On a related note, even a very fine powder of very low friction feels different to water - how can you capture the sensation of water using beads and blocks of a reasonably large size? -- Nathan Cook -- agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription --- 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=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] The Smushaby of Flatway.
On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 3:47 PM, Jim Bromer jimbro...@gmail.com wrote: For instance, when it is discovered that probabilistic reasoning isn't quite good enough for advanced nlp, many hopefuls will rediscover the creative 'solution' of using orthogonal multidimensional 'measures' of semantic distance. Instead of following their intuition and coming up with ways to make the reasoning seem more natural, they first turn toward a more fanciful method by which they try to force the corpus of natural language to conform to their previously decision to use a simple metric. My recommendation would be to first try to begin thinking about how natural reasoning might be better structured to solve those problems before you start distorting the data. For an example, reasons are often used in natural reasoning. A reason can be good or bad. A reason can provide causal information about the reasoning but even a good reason may only shed light on information incidental to the reasoning. The value of a reason can be relative to both the reasoning and the nature of the supplied reason itself. My point here is that the relation of reason to reasoning is significant (especially when they work) although it can be very complicated. But even though the use of a reason is not simple, notice how natural and familiar it seems. I realized after I wrote this that the invented metric of semantic distance can be used to 'solve' a semantic problem using mathematical means. In my suggestion that more highly structured methods of reasoning should be considered before distorting the data with some artifice I pointed out that reasons that are naturally used in decision making could be included in the structure of reasoning . But the problem is, of course, that examining the reasons for a conclusion does not immediately -solve- the programming problem the way numerical metrics and mathematical methods can. Ok, but you can still create artificial methods to test structural reasoning if you are eager to start programming. I am going to try this out because I believe that a somewhat extensible GOFAI model can be derived from a use of structured reasoning (and some other ideas I have) even though I would have to first supply simplistic 'solutions' for the program to use. I am saying that before you start creating elaborate artifices to jump start your project you should first use your intuition to see if more natural ways of dealing with the problem exist. This might not make the problem look easier. But even though I would have to create some simplistic solutions for my first model, I believe that the concept of more highly structured reasoning should help me keep these artifices to a minimum. Jim Bromer --- 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=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
