Re: [agi] Doubts raised over brain scan findings
Vladimir Nesov wrote: On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 4:34 AM, Richard Loosemore r...@lightlink.com wrote: Vladimir Nesov wrote: On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 3:03 AM, Richard Loosemore r...@lightlink.com wrote: The whole point about the paper referenced above is that they are collecting (in a large number of cases) data that is just random noise. So what? The paper points out a methodological problem that in itself has little to do with neuroscience. Not correct at all: this *is* neuroscience. I don't understand why you say that it is not. From what I got from the abstract and by skimming the paper, it's a methodological problem in handling data from neuroscience experiments (bad statistics). The field as a whole is hardly mortally afflicted with that problem I mentioned it because there is a context in which this sits. The context is that an entire area - which might be called deriving psychological conclusions from barin scan data - is getting massive funding and massive attention, and yet it is quite arguably in an Emperor's New Clothes state. In other words, the conclusions being drawn are (for a variety of reasons) of very dubious quality. If you look at any field large enough, there will be bad science. According to the significant number of people who criticize it, this field appears to be dominated by bad science. This is not just an isolated case. That's a whole new level of alarm, relevant for anyone trying to learn from neuroscience, but it requires stronger substantiation, mere 50 papers that got confused with statistics don't do it justice. You are missing the context: I mentioned this because of an earlier discussion centered on the paper by Trevor Harley, and the follow-up paper that he and I wrote together. We are only two people among many who are making various kinds of criticisms. This is certainly not *just* a case of 50 papers which did some not very good statistics - taking it that way would be a complete misunderstanding of the situation. The reason I flagged this most recent paper was that some people seemed to be under the impression, from that earlier discussion, that perhaps this was just my imagination. I wanted to point out that there are increasing nummbers of people making the same Emperor-Has-No-Clothes complaint. Sooner or later this will become big news in the scientific community - someone will write a big expose, and the neuroscience people will find themselves under fire for having wasted everyone's time with so much well-funded bogus science. But right now we are in the early phase, much as was a few years ago when you could read all about the mortgage crisis and the financial meltdown in the left-wing press, but everyone else was ignoring them. What you are getting is an inside track on this below-ground scandal, coming from me, a few years before you read it on the front pages of Scientific American or Nature. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Bayesian surprise attracts human attention
Bob Mottram wrote: 2009/1/15 Ronald C. Blue ronb...@u2ai.us: Bayesian surprise attracts human attention http://tinyurl.com/77p9xo In my opinion any research carried out at universities using public money should be available to the public, without additional charges. Agreed. Sounds interesting. Well... not so much. This is what I have gleaned from the abstract. The researchers demolished an old idea about attention (from the 1950s) and pretended to test a new idea. In fact the new idea is so well-established that everyone takes it for granted: attention shift is driven by surprise or novelty or unexpectedness. Perspective: Recall that there was once a theory that heat was a fluid that passed between bodies (caloric). Then, that old theory was superceded by the new idea that heat and temperature were just average molecular motion. Now imagine that someone came along and published a paper claiming to have discovered this second idea, years after it had become common knowledge. But what you find, when you read the details, is that what they actual did was just take a thermometer and draw a scale on the outside of it - a completely arbitrary scale that they made up - and then declare that BECAUSE they slapped the scale on the outside, THEREFORE they have validated or proved or demonstrated the idea of temperature being molecular motion, rather than the movements of caloric fluid. This is exactly what these people have just done with the notion of surprise. It adds nothing useful to what we know. If they had shown that there is a mechanism that actually computes the bayesian probabilities, then governs the attention shift using the results of that calculation, that would have been progress. But just finding something that covaries with novelty is like shooting fish in a barrel. Of course, it's not like these are the only people making this kind of non-progress ;-) 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] Doubts raised over brain scan findings
For anyone interested in recent discussions of neuroscience and the level of scientific validity to the various brain-scann claims, the study by Vul et al, discussed here: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126914.700-doubts-raised-over-brain-scan-findings.html and available here: http://www.pashler.com/Articles/Vul_etal_2008inpress.pdf ... is a welcome complement to the papers by Trevor Harley (and myself). The title of the paper is Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience, and that use of the word voodoo pretty much sums up the attitude of a number of critics of the field. We've attacked from a different direction, but we had a wide range of targets to choose, believe me. The short version of the overall story is that neuroscience is out of control as far as overinflated claims go. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Doubts raised over brain scan findings
Vladimir Nesov wrote: On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 10:59 PM, Richard Loosemore r...@lightlink.com wrote: For anyone interested in recent discussions of neuroscience and the level of scientific validity to the various brain-scann claims, the study by Vul et al, discussed here: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126914.700-doubts-raised-over-brain-scan-findings.html and available here: http://www.pashler.com/Articles/Vul_etal_2008inpress.pdf ... is a welcome complement to the papers by Trevor Harley (and myself). The title of the paper is Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience, and that use of the word voodoo pretty much sums up the attitude of a number of critics of the field. We've attacked from a different direction, but we had a wide range of targets to choose, believe me. The short version of the overall story is that neuroscience is out of control as far as overinflated claims go. Richard, even if your concerns are somewhat valid, why is it interesting here? It's not like neuroscience is dominated by discussions of (mis)interpretation of results, they are collecting data, and with that they are steadily getting somewhere. I don't understand. The whole point about the paper referenced above is that they are collecting (in a large number of cases) data that is just random noise. And in the work that I did, analyzing several neuroscience papers, the conclusion was that many of their conclusions were unfounded. That is exactly the opposite of what you just said: they are not steadily getting somewhere they are filling the research world with noise. I do not understand how you can see what was said in the above paper, and yet say what you just said. Bear in mind that we are targeting the (extremely large number of) claims of psychological validity that are coming out of the neuroscience community. If they collect data and do not make psychological claims, all power to them. I don't particularly want to get into an argument about it. It was just a little backup information for what I said before. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Doubts raised over brain scan findings
Vladimir Nesov wrote: On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 3:03 AM, Richard Loosemore r...@lightlink.com wrote: The whole point about the paper referenced above is that they are collecting (in a large number of cases) data that is just random noise. So what? The paper points out a methodological problem that in itself has little to do with neuroscience. Not correct at all: this *is* neuroscience. I don't understand why you say that it is not. The field as a whole is hardly mortally afflicted with that problem I mentioned it because there is a context in which this sits. The context is that an entire area - which might be called deriving psychological conclusions from barin scan data - is getting massive funding and massive attention, and yet it is quite arguably in an Emperor's New Clothes state. In other words, the conclusions being drawn are (for a variety of reasons) of very dubious quality. (whether it's even real or not). It is real. If you look at any field large enough, there will be bad science. According to the significant number of people who criticize it, this field appears to be dominated by bad science. This is not just an isolated case. How is it relevant to study of AGI? People here are sometimes interested in cognitive science matters, and some are interested in the concept of building an AGI by brain emulation. Neuroscience is relevant to that. Beyond that, this is just an FYI. I really do not care to put much effort into this. If people are interested, they can read the paper. But if they doubt the validity of the entire idea that there is a problem with neuroscience claims about psychological processes, I'm afraid I do not have the time to argue, simply because the level of general expertise here is not such that I can discuss it without explaining the whole critique from scratch. As you say, it is not important enough, in an AGI context, to spend much time on. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] initial reaction to A2I2's call center product
Ben Goertzel wrote: AGI company A2I2 has released a product for automating call center functionality, see... http://www.smartaction.com/index.html Based on reading the website here is my initial reaction Certainly, automating a higher and higher percentage of call center functionality is a worthy goal, and a place one would expect AGI technology to be able to play a role. Current automated call center systems either provide extremely crude functionality, or else require extensive domain customization prior to each deployment; and they still show serious shortcomings even after such customization, due largely to their inability to interpret the user's statements in terms of an appropriate contextual understanding. The promise AGI technology offers for this domain is the possibility of responding to user statements with the contextual understanding that only general intelligence can bring. The extent to which A2I2 has really solved this very difficult problem, however, is impossible to assess without actually trying the product. What they have might be an incremental improvement over existing technologies, or it might be a quantum leap forward; based on the information provided, there is no way to tell. For example http://www.tuvox.com/ is a quite sophisticated competitor and it would be interesting to see a head to head competition between their system and A2I2's. The available materials tell little about the underlying technology. Claims such as Functionally, it recognizes speech, understands the caller's meaning and intent, remembers the evolving context of the conversation, and obtains information in real time from databases and websites. are evocative but could be interpreted in many different ways. Interpreted most broadly, this would imply that A2I2 has achieved a human-level AI system; but if this were the case, there would be better things to do with it than automate call centers. Based on the available information, it's not clear just how narrowly one must interpret these assertions to obtain agreement with the truth. What is clear is that they are taking an adaptive learning based approach rather than an approach based on extensive hand-coding of linguistic resources, which is interesting, and vaguely reminiscent of Robert Hecht-Nielsen's neural net approach to language processing. Have you asked Peter if he would be willing to share a demonstration with us, perhaps at AGI-09? I agree that the marketing rhetoric could be interpreted anywhere from incremental improvement to quantum leap: but my money is on something relatively incremental. Remember: something like OCR, when it was first available, seemed amazing when it could boast a pickup efficiency of 95%. But I have had the unenviable task of proofreading an entire (Welsh) dictionary in which the OCR did 95% of the work and I did the other 5%. It was a nightmare. That last 5% is where all the action is. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Identity abstraction
Ronald C. Blue wrote: I would agree that we are mutually close in ideas. Also current programming efforts at AI will not be wasted because those action packs can be used as seed for any AGI machine that has self control and awareness. Actually there are many paths to new AGI machines, we even went around our own original patent application but maintained the fundamental of the theoretical model of AGI based on the Correlational Holographic Opponent Processing model of the human mind. So far it seems as our approach is the best direction relative to others published research and models. Future direction and success is unknowable. You are correct that the heart of the AGI device is modeling the opponent-process which is creative into a physical circuit duplicating these paradoxical analogies. In so doing we have discover some rather odd unexpected behavior. Considering the 13 or B problem which is really based on our experiences of 13 or B. A primitive African cattle herdsman might see the milk producing breast of the cows. The point of view is that the observer collapses the meaning from stimuli and the stimuli do not cause the meaning. Only an AGI that is self aware can do this. The odd thing about the circuit is that you get different results when you measure either side of the opponent process circuit. Also the measurement destroys the information. If you don't measure it, it works. Why B over 13 Memory or priming and habituation are keys for creative shifts in perception. Goodness of fit of a stimulus after rotational and interference analysis results in a temporary conclusion. That conclusion can be habituated which cause another probability to express itself. Using your bicycle or bull pictures as an example http://cn.cl2000.com/history/beida/ysts/image18/jpg/02.jpg MINUS http://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/images/departments/classics_bulls_head_rhyton.jpg EQUALS So you can see that there is a goodness of fit between the two stimuli. Also notice that new knowledge is a product of allowing fact or identities to interact with each other. My program skills were inadequate compared to the ability of the human brain for creating the analysis but you got the idea. A average woman is a beautiful woman. The average woman is the average of all women we have ever met. A average theory of all the facts is a beautiful theory of the facts that we know. Variability comes from the realization that each person has a rich history of experiences. Those stored average memories of identities is what we use to judge our current experiences and occasion jump out of of comfort zone. Once the jump has occurred there is no going back. We have two brains (actually 4). One brain see tiny details and one brain sees the whole or big emotional pictures. When we combine that information we making a great leap forward. A good AGI machine has to do the same. Ron Please do not include images in your posts. The usual etiquette is to put them on a web server somewhere and give pointers in your message sent to the list. Thankyou 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/?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. (http
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] The Smushaby of Flatway.
Ronald C. Blue wrote: [snip] [snip] ... chaos stimulation because ... correlational wavelet opponent processing machine ... globally entangled ... Paul rf trap ... parallel modulating string pulses ... a relative zero energy value or opponent process ... phase locked ... parallel opponent process ... reciprocal Eigenfunction ... opponent process ... summation interference ... gaussian reference rf trap ... oscillon output picture ... locked into the forth harmonic ... ... entangled with its Eigenfunction .. [snip] That is what entangled memory means. Okay, I got that. But how can it dequark the tachyon antimatter containment field? Richard Loosemore Mark Waser wrote: But how can it dequark the tachyon antimatter containment field? Richard, You missed Mike Tintner's explanation . . . . 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 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). 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 Mark, Right So you think maybe what we've got here is a radical influx of globally entangled free-association bosons? 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Identity abstraction
Harry Chesley wrote: I'm trying to get an idea of how our minds handle the tension between identity and abstraction, and it occurs to me that there have probably been human subject experiments that would shed light on this. Does anyone know of any? The basic issue: On the one hand, we identify two objects as being the same one (having the same identity), even when encountered at different times or from different perspectives. At least a part of how we do this is very likely a matter of noticing that the two objects have common features which are unlikely to occur together at random. On the other hand, over time we make abstractions of situations that we encounter repeatedly, most likely by removing details that are not in common between the instances. Yet it's these very details that let us derive identity. So how do we remember abstractions that are dependent on identity? It seems that there must be experiments or evidence from brain-damaged individuals that would give clues. Example: I may notice over time that whenever object A is smaller than object B and object B is smaller than object C, then object A is smaller than object C. Note that I have to give them names in order to even state the problem. Internally, we might do likewise and assign names, in which case there might be a part of the brain that performs the naming and could be damaged. Or we might go back to the original cases (case-based reasoning). Or we might store references to the original object instances from which we abstracted the general rule, which would provide unique identity. The later two may be distinguishable experimentally by choosing clever instances to abstract from. Anyone know of any research that sheds light on this area? It is impossible to answer your question the way it is posed, because it needs to become more specific before it can be answered, and on the way to becoming more specific, you will find yourself drawn into an enormous maze of theoretical assumptions and empirical data. There are indeed parts of the brain that are involved in naming, but what we know could fill an entire book (or several) and it is organized according to our observations of what kinds of behaviors occur when some thing goes wrong, or when a particular experimental manipulation is performed. Those behaviors do not, by themselves, answer your astract questions about the underlying structures and mechanisms ... those structures and mechanisms are the subject of debate. Essentially, you are asking for cognitive science to be more mature than it is at the moment. 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. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Identity abstraction
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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] The Smushaby of Flatway.
Ronald C. Blue wrote: [snip] [snip] ... chaos stimulation because ... correlational wavelet opponent processing machine ... globally entangled ... Paul rf trap ... parallel modulating string pulses ... a relative zero energy value or opponent process ... phase locked ... parallel opponent process ... reciprocal Eigenfunction ... opponent process ... summation interference ... gaussian reference rf trap ... oscillon output picture ... locked into the forth harmonic ... ... entangled with its Eigenfunction .. [snip] That is what entangled memory means. Okay, I got that. But how can it dequark the tachyon antimatter containment field? 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] [Science Daily] Our Unconscious Brain Makes The Best Decisions Possible
Jim Bromer wrote: On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 4:02 PM, Richard Loosemore r...@lightlink.com wrote: My friend Mike Oaksford in the UK has written several papers giving a higher level cognitive theory that says that people are, in fact, doing something like bayesian estimation when then make judgments. In fact, people are very good at being bayesians, contra the loud protests of the I Am A Bayesian Rationalist crowd, who think they were the first to do it. Richard Loosemore That sounds like an easy hypothesis to test. Except for a problem. Previous learning would be relevant to the solving of the problems and would produce results that could not be totally accounted for. Complexity, in the complicated sense of the term, is relevant to this problem, both in the complexity of how previous learning that might influence decision making and the possible (likely) complexity of the process of judgment itself. If extensive tests showed that people overwhelmingly made judgments that were Bayesianesque then this conjecture would be important. The problem is, that since the numerous possible influences of previous learning has to be ruled out, I would suspect that any test for Bayesian-like reasoning would have to be kept so simple that it would not add anything new to our knowledge. Uh... you have to actually read the research to know how they came to these conclusions. Take it from me, they are mite bit ahead of you on this one :-). 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] [Science Daily] Our Unconscious Brain Makes The Best Decisions Possible
Lukasz Stafiniak wrote: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081224215542.htm Nothing surprising ;-) Nothing surprising?!! 8-) Don't say that too loudly, Yudkowsky might hear you. :-) The article is a bit naughty when it says, of Tversky and Kahnemann, that ...this has become conventional wisdom among cognition researchers. Actually, the original facts were interpreted in a variety of ways, some of which strongly disagreed with T K's original intepretation, just like this one you reference above. The only thing that is conventional wisdom is that the topic exists, and is the subject of dispute. And, as many people know, I made the mistake of challenging Yudkowsky on precisely this subject back in 2006, when he wrote an essay strongly advocating TK's original intepretation. Yudkowsky went completely berserk, accused me of being an idiot, having no brain, not reading any of the literature, never answering questions, and generally being something unspeakably worse than a slime-oozing crank. He literally wrote an essay denouncing me as equivalent to a flat-earth believing crackpot. When I suggested that someone go check some of his ravings with an outside authority, he banned me from his discussion list. Ah, such are the joys of being speaking truth to power(ful idiots). ;-) As far as this research goes, it sits somewhere down at the lower end of the available theories. My friend Mike Oaksford in the UK has written several papers giving a higher level cognitive theory that says that people are, in fact, doing something like bayesian estimation when then make judgments. In fact, people are very good at being bayesians, contra the loud protests of the I Am A Bayesian Rationalist crowd, who think they were the first to do it. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Alternative Cicuitry
John G. Rose wrote: Reading this - http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/health/23blin.html?ref=science makes me wonder what other circuitry we have that's discouraged from being accepted. This blindsight news is not really news. It has been known for decades that there are two separate visual pathways in the brain, which seem to process what information and vision for action information. So this recent hubbub is just a new, more dramatic demonstration of something that has been known about for a long time. This is my take on what is going on here: The interesting fact is that the vision for action pathway can operate without conscious awareness. It is an autopilot. What this seems to imply is that at some early point in evolution there was only that pathway, and there was no general ability to think about higher level aspects of the world. Then the higher cognitive mechanisms developed, while the older system remained in place. The higher cognitive mechanisms grew their own system for analyzing visual input (the 'what pathway), but it turned out that the brain could still use the older pathway in parallel with the new, so it was left in place. I am going to add this as a prediction derived from the model of consciousness in my AGI-09 paper: the prediction is that when we uncover the exact implementation details of the analysis mechanism that I discussed in the paper, we will find that the AM is entirely within the higher cognitive system, and that the vision-for-action pathway just happens to be beyond the scope of what the AM can access. It is because it is outside that scope that no consciousness is associated with what that pathway does. (Unfortunately, of course, this prediction cannot be fully tested until we can pin down the exact details of how the analysis mechanism gets implemented in the brain. The same is true of the other predictions). 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Universal intelligence test benchmark
Philip Hunt wrote: 2008/12/26 Matt Mahoney matmaho...@yahoo.com: I have updated my universal intelligence test with benchmarks on about 100 compression programs. Humans aren't particularly good at compressing data. Does this mean humans aren't intelligent, or is it a poor definition of intelligence? Although my goal was to sample a Solomonoff distribution to measure universal intelligence (as defined by Hutter and Legg), If I define intelligence as the ability to catch mice, does that mean my cat is more intelligent than most humans? More to the point, I don't understand the point of defining intelligence this way. Care to enlighten me? This may or may not help, but in the past I have pursued exactly these questions, only to get such confusing, evasive and circular answers, all of which amounted to nothing meaningful, that eventually I (like many others) have just had to give up and not engage any more. So, the real answers to your questions are that no, compression is an extremely poor definition of intelligence; and yes, defining intelligence to be something completely arbitrary (like the ability to catch mice) is what Hutter and Legg's analyses are all about. Searching for previous posts of mine which mention Hutter, Legg or AIXI will probably turn up a number of lengthy discussion in which I took a deal of trouble to debunk this stuff. Feel free, of course, to make your own attempt to extract some sense from it all, and by all means let me know if you eventually come to a different conclusion. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Introducing Steve's Theory of Everything in cognition.
Steve Richfield wrote: Richard, On 12/25/08, *Richard Loosemore* r...@lightlink.com mailto:r...@lightlink.com wrote: Steve Richfield wrote: Ben, et al, After ~5 months of delay for theoretical work, here are the basic ideas as to how really fast and efficient automatic learning could be made almost trivial. I decided NOT to post the paper (yet), but rather, to just discuss the some of the underlying ideas in AGI-friendly terms. Suppose for a moment that a NN or AGI program (they can be easily mapped from one form to the other ... this is not obvious, to say the least. Mapping involves many compromises that change the functioning of each type ... There are doubtless exceptions to my broad statement, but generally, neuron functionality is WIDE open to be pretty much ANYTHING you choose, including that of an AGI engine's functionality on its equations. In the reverse, any NN could be expressed in a shorthand form that contains structure, synapse functions, etc., and an AGI engine could be built/modified to function according to that shorthand. In short, mapping between NN and AGI forms presumes flexibility in the functionality of the target form. Where that flexibility is NOT present, e.g. because of orthogonal structure, etc., then you must ask whether something is being gained or lost by the difference. Clearly, any transition that involves a loss should be carefully examined to see if the entire effort is headed in the wrong direction, which I think was your original point here. There is a problem here. When someone says X and Y can easily be mapped from one form to the other there is an implication that they are NOt suggesting that we go right down to the basic constituents of both X and Y in order to effect the mapping. Thus: Chalk and Cheese can easily be mapped from one to the other trivially true if we are prepared to go down to the common denominator of electrons, protons and neutrons. But if we stay at a sensible level then, no, these do not map onto one another. Similarly, if you claim that NN and regular AGI map onto one another, I assume that you are saying something more substantial than that these two can both be broken down into their primitive computational parts, and that when this is done they seem equivalent. NN and regular AGI, they way they are understood by people who understand them, have very different styles of constructing intelligent systems. Sure, you can code both in C, or Lisp, or Cobol, but that is to trash the real meaning of are easily mapped onto one another. ), instead of operating on objects (in an object-oriented sense) Neither NN nor AGI has any intrinsic relationship to OO. Clearly I need a better term here. Both NNs and AGIs tend to have neurons or equations that reflect the presence (or absence) of various objects, conditions, actions, etc. My fundamental assertion is that if you differentiate the inputs so that everything in the entire network reflects dp/dt instead of straight probabilities, then the network works identically, but learning is GREATLY simplified. Seems like a simple misunderstanding: you were not aware that object oriented does not mean the same as saying that there are fundamental atomic constituents of a representation. , instead, operates on the rate-of-changes in the probabilities of objects, or dp/dt. Presuming sufficient bandwidth to generally avoid superstitious coincidences, fast unsupervised learning then becomes completely trivial, as like objects cause simultaneous like-patterned changes in the inputs WITHOUT the overlapping effects of the many other objects typically present in the input (with numerous minor exceptions). You have already presumed that something supplies the system with objects that are meaningful. Even before your first mention of dp/dt, there has to be a mechanism that is so good that it never invents objects such as: Object A: A person who once watched all of Tuesday Welds movies in the space of one week or Object B: Something that is a combination of Julius Caesar's pinky toe and a sour grape that Brutus' just spat out or Object C: All of the molecules involved in a swiming gala that happen to be 17.36 meters from the last drop of water that splashed from the pool. You have supplied no mechanism that is able to do that, but that mechanism is 90% of the trouble, if learning is what you are about. With prior unsupervised learning you are 100% correct. However none of the examples you gave involved temporal simultaneity. I will discuss B above because it is close enough to be interesting. If indeed someone just began to notice something interesting about Caesar's pinkie toe *_as_* they just began to notice the taste
Re: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke ---- was ---- Building a machine that can learn from experience
Ed Porter wrote: Why is it that people who repeatedly and insultingly say other people’s work or ideas are total nonsense -- without any reasonable justification -- are still allowed to participate in the discussion on the AGI list? Because they know what they are talking about. And because they got that way by having a low tolerance for fools, nonsense and people who can't tell the difference between the critique of an idea and a personal insult. ;-) 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke ---- was ---- Building a machine that can learn from experience
Why is it that people who repeatedly resort to personal abuse like this are still allowed to participate in the discussion on the AGI list? Richard Loosemore Ed Porter wrote: Richard, You originally totally trashed Tononi's paper, including its central core, by saying: It is, for want of a better word, nonsense. And since people take me to task for being so dismissive, let me add that it is the central thesis of the paper that is nonsense: if you ask yourself very carefully what it is he is claiming, you can easily come up with counterexammples that make a mockery of his conclusion.\ When asked to support your statement that you can easily come up with counterexammples that make a mockery of his conclusion you refused. You did so by grossly mis-describing Tononi’s paper (for example it does not include “pages of …math”, of any sort, and particularly not “pages of irrelevant math”) and implying its mis-described faults so offended your delicate sense of AGI propriety that re-reading it enough to find support for your extremely critical (and perhaps totally unfair) condemnation would be either too much work or too emotionally painful. You said the counterexamples to the core of this paper were easy to come up with, but you can’t seem to come up with any. Such stunts have the appearance of being those of a pompous windbag. Ed Porter P.S. Your postscript is not sufficiently clear to provide much support for your position. P.P.S. You below -Original Message- From: Richard Loosemore [mailto:r...@lightlink.com] Sent: Tuesday, December 23, 2008 9:53 AM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke was Building a machine that can learn from experience Ed Porter wrote: Richard, Please describe some of the counterexamples, that you can easily come up with, that make a mockery of Tononi's conclusion. Ed Porter Alas, I will have to disappoint. I put a lot of effort into understanding his paper first time around, but the sheer agony of reading (/listening to) his confused, shambling train of thought, the non-sequiteurs, and the pages of irrelevant math that I do not need to experience a second time. All of my original effort only resulted in the discovery that I had wasted my time, so I have no interest in wasting more of my time. With other papers that contain more coherent substance, but perhaps what looks like an error, I would make the effort. But not this one. It will have to be left as an exercise for the reader, I'm afraid. Richard Loosemore P.S. A hint. All I remember was that he started talking about multiple regions (columns?) of the brain exchanging information with one another in a particular way, and then he asserted a conclusion which, on quick reflection, I knew would not be true of a system resembling the distributed one that I described in my consciousness paper (the molecular model). Knowing that his conclusion was flat-out untrue for that one case, and for a whole class of similar systems, his argument was toast. -Original Message- From: Richard Loosemore [mailto:r...@lightlink.com] Sent: Monday, December 22, 2008 8:54 AM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke was Building a machine that can learn from experience Ed Porter wrote: I don't think this AGI list should be so quick to dismiss a $4.9 million dollar grant to create an AGI. It will not necessarily be vaporware. I think we should view it as a good sign. Even if it is for a project that runs the risk, like many DARPA projects (like most scientific funding in general) of not necessarily placing its money where it might do the most good --- it is likely to at least produce some interesting results --- and it just might make some very important advances in our field. The article from http://www.physorg.com/news148754667.html said: .a $4.9 million grant.for the first phase of DARPA's Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) project. Tononi and scientists from Columbia University and IBM will work on the software for the thinking computer, while nanotechnology and supercomputing experts from Cornell, Stanford and the University of California-Merced will create the hardware. Dharmendra Modha of IBM is the principal investigator. The idea is to create a computer capable of sorting through multiple streams of changing data, to look for patterns and make logical decisions. There's another requirement: The finished cognitive computer should be as small as a the brain of a small mammal and use as little power as a 100-watt light bulb. It's a major
Re: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke ---- was ---- Building a machine that can learn from experience
Ed Porter wrote: Richard, Please describe some of the counterexamples, that you can easily come up with, that make a mockery of Tononi's conclusion. Ed Porter Alas, I will have to disappoint. I put a lot of effort into understanding his paper first time around, but the sheer agony of reading (/listening to) his confused, shambling train of thought, the non-sequiteurs, and the pages of irrelevant math that I do not need to experience a second time. All of my original effort only resulted in the discovery that I had wasted my time, so I have no interest in wasting more of my time. With other papers that contain more coherent substance, but perhaps what looks like an error, I would make the effort. But not this one. It will have to be left as an exercise for the reader, I'm afraid. Richard Loosemore P.S. A hint. All I remember was that he started talking about multiple regions (columns?) of the brain exchanging information with one another in a particular way, and then he asserted a conclusion which, on quick reflection, I knew would not be true of a system resembling the distributed one that I described in my consciousness paper (the molecular model). Knowing that his conclusion was flat-out untrue for that one case, and for a whole class of similar systems, his argument was toast. -Original Message- From: Richard Loosemore [mailto:r...@lightlink.com] Sent: Monday, December 22, 2008 8:54 AM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke was Building a machine that can learn from experience Ed Porter wrote: I don't think this AGI list should be so quick to dismiss a $4.9 million dollar grant to create an AGI. It will not necessarily be vaporware. I think we should view it as a good sign. Even if it is for a project that runs the risk, like many DARPA projects (like most scientific funding in general) of not necessarily placing its money where it might do the most good --- it is likely to at least produce some interesting results --- and it just might make some very important advances in our field. The article from http://www.physorg.com/news148754667.html said: .a $4.9 million grant.for the first phase of DARPA's Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) project. Tononi and scientists from Columbia University and IBM will work on the software for the thinking computer, while nanotechnology and supercomputing experts from Cornell, Stanford and the University of California-Merced will create the hardware. Dharmendra Modha of IBM is the principal investigator. The idea is to create a computer capable of sorting through multiple streams of changing data, to look for patterns and make logical decisions. There's another requirement: The finished cognitive computer should be as small as a the brain of a small mammal and use as little power as a 100-watt light bulb. It's a major challenge. But it's what our brains do every day. I have just spent several hours reading a Tononi paper, An information integration theory of consciousness and skimmed several parts of his book A Universe of Consciousness he wrote with Edleman, whom Ben has referred to often in his writings. (I have attached my mark up of the article, which if you read just the yellow highlighted text, or (for more detail) the red, you can get a quick understanding of. You can also view it in MSWord outline mode if you like.) This paper largely agrees with my notion, stated multiple times on this list, that consciousness is an incredibly complex computation that interacts with itself in a very rich manner that makes it aware of itself. For the record, this looks like the paper that I listened to Tononi talk about a couple of years ago -- the one I mentioned in my last message. It is, for want of a better word, nonsense. And since people take me to task for being so dismissive, let me add that it is the central thesis of the paper that is nonsense: if you ask yourself very carefully what it is he is claiming, you can easily come up with counterexammples that make a mockery of his conclusion. 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
Re: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke ---- was ---- Building a machine that can learn from experience
Ben Goertzel wrote: Richard, I'm curious what you think of William Calvin's neuroscience hypotheses as presented in e.g. The Cerebral Code That book is a bit out of date now, but still, he took complexity and nonlinear dynamics quite seriously, so it seems to me there may be some resonance between his ideas and your own I find his speculative ideas more agreeable than Tononi's, myself... thx ben g Yes, I did read his book (or part of it) back in 98/99, but From what I remember, I found resonance, as you say, but he is one of those people who is struggling to find a way to turn an intuition into something concrete. It is just that he wrote a book about it before he got to Concrete Operations. It would be interesting to take a look at it again, 10 years later, and see whether my opinion has changed. To put this in context, I felt like I was looking at a copy of myself back in 1982, when I struggled to write down my intuitions as a physicist coming to terms with psychology for the first time. I am now acutely embarrassed by the naivete of that first attempt, but in spite of the embarrassment I know that I have since turned those intuitions into something meaningful, and I know that in spite of my original hubris, I was on a path to something that actually did make sense. To cognitive scientists at the time it looked awful, unmotivated and disconnected from reality (by itself, it was!), but in the end it was not trash because it had real substance buried inside it. With people like Calvin (and others) I see writings that look somewhat speculative and ungrounded, just like my early attempts, so I am mixed between a desire to be lenient (because I was that like that once) and a feeling that they really need to be aware that their thoughts are still ungelled. Anyhow, that's my quick thoughts on him. I'll see if I can dig out his book at some point. Richard Loosemore On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 9:53 AM, Richard Loosemore r...@lightlink.com mailto:r...@lightlink.com wrote: Ed Porter wrote: Richard, Please describe some of the counterexamples, that you can easily come up with, that make a mockery of Tononi's conclusion. Ed Porter Alas, I will have to disappoint. I put a lot of effort into understanding his paper first time around, but the sheer agony of reading (/listening to) his confused, shambling train of thought, the non-sequiteurs, and the pages of irrelevant math that I do not need to experience a second time. All of my original effort only resulted in the discovery that I had wasted my time, so I have no interest in wasting more of my time. With other papers that contain more coherent substance, but perhaps what looks like an error, I would make the effort. But not this one. It will have to be left as an exercise for the reader, I'm afraid. Richard Loosemore P.S. A hint. All I remember was that he started talking about multiple regions (columns?) of the brain exchanging information with one another in a particular way, and then he asserted a conclusion which, on quick reflection, I knew would not be true of a system resembling the distributed one that I described in my consciousness paper (the molecular model). Knowing that his conclusion was flat-out untrue for that one case, and for a whole class of similar systems, his argument was toast. -Original Message- From: Richard Loosemore [mailto:r...@lightlink.com mailto:r...@lightlink.com] Sent: Monday, December 22, 2008 8:54 AM To: agi@v2.listbox.com mailto:agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke was Building a machine that can learn from experience Ed Porter wrote: I don't think this AGI list should be so quick to dismiss a $4.9 million dollar grant to create an AGI. It will not necessarily be vaporware. I think we should view it as a good sign. Even if it is for a project that runs the risk, like many DARPA projects (like most scientific funding in general) of not necessarily placing its money where it might do the most good --- it is likely to at least produce some interesting results --- and it just might make some very important advances in our field. The article from http://www.physorg.com/news148754667.html said: .a $4.9 million grant.for the first phase of DARPA's Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) project. Tononi and scientists from Columbia University and IBM will work on the software for the thinking computer, while
Re: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke ---- was ---- Building a machine that can learn from experience
Ben Goertzel wrote: I know Dharmendra Mohdha a bit, and I've corresponded with Eugene Izhikevich who is Edelman's collaborator on large-scale brain simulations. I've read Tononi's stuff too. I think these are all smart people with deep understandings, and all in all this will be research money well spent. However, there is no design for a thinking machine here. There is cool work on computer simulations of small portions of the brain. I find nothing to disrespect in the scientific work involved in this DARPA project. It may not be the absolute most valuable research path, but it's a good one. However, IMO the rhetoric associating it with thinking machine building is premature and borderline dishonest. It's marketing rhetoric. I agree with this last paragraph wholeheartedly: this is exactly what I meant when I said Neuroscience vaporware. I also know Tononi's work, because I listened to him give a talk about consciousness once. It was *computationally* incoherent. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Relevance of SE in AGI
Valentina Poletti wrote: I have a question for you AGIers.. from your experience as well as from your background, how relevant do you think software engineering is in developing AI software and, in particular AGI software? Just wondering.. does software verification as well as correctness proving serve any use in this field? Or is this something used just for Nasa and critical applications? 1) Software engineering (if we take that to mean the conventional repertoire of techniques taught as SE) is relevant to any project that gets up above a certain size, but it is less important when the project is much smaller, serves a more exploratory function, or where the design is constantly changing. To this extent I agree with Pei's comments. 2) If you are looking beyond the idea of simply grabbing some SE techniques off the shelf, and are instead asking if SE can have an impact on AGI, then the answer is a dramatic Yes!. Why? Because tools determine the way that we *can* think about things. Tools shape our thoughts. They can sometimes enable us to think in new ways that were simply not possible before the tools were invented. I decided a long time ago that if cognitive scientists had easy-to-use use tools that enabled them to construct realistic components of thinking systems, their entire style of explanation would be revolutionized. Right now, cog sci people cannot afford the time to be both cog sci experts *and* sophisticated software developers, so they have to make do with programming that is, by and large, trivially simple. This determines the kinds of models and explanations they can come up with. (Ditto in spades for the neuroscientists, by the way). So, the more global answer to your question is that nothing could be more important for AGI than software engineering. The problem is, that the kind of software engineering we are talking about is not a matter of grabbing SE components off the shelf, but asking what the needs of cognitive scientists and AGIers might be, and then inventing new techniques and tools that will give these people the ability to think about intelligent systems in new ways. That is why I am working on Safaire. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Relevance of SE in AGI
Ben Goertzel wrote: Well, we have attempted to use sound software engineering principles to architect the OpenCog framework, with a view toward making it usable for prototyping speculative AI ideas and ultimately building scalable, robust, mature AGI systems as well But, we are fairly confident of our overall architecture with this system because there have been a number of predecessor systems based on similar principles, which we implemented and learned a lot from ... If one has a new AGI idea and wants to start experimenting with it, SE is basically a secondary matter ... the point is to explore the algorithms and ideas by whatever means is less time-wasting and frustrating... OTOH, if one has an AGI idea that's already been fleshed out a fair bit and one is ready to try to use it as the basis for a scalable, extensible system, SE is more worth paying attention to... Premature attention to engineering when one should be focusing on science is a risk, but so is ignoring engineering when one wants to build a scalable, extensible system... I think you missed my point, but no matter. My point was that premature attention to engineering is absolutely vital in a field such as the cognitive science approach to AGI. Cognitive scientists simply do not have the time to be experts in cognitive science, AND software engineers at the same time. Fort that reason, their models, and the way they think about theoretical models, are severely constrained by their weak ability to build software systems. In this case, the science is being crippled by the lack of tools, so there is no such thing as premature attention to engineering. Richard Loosemore ben g On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 9:03 AM, Richard Loosemore r...@lightlink.com mailto:r...@lightlink.com wrote: Valentina Poletti wrote: I have a question for you AGIers.. from your experience as well as from your background, how relevant do you think software engineering is in developing AI software and, in particular AGI software? Just wondering.. does software verification as well as correctness proving serve any use in this field? Or is this something used just for Nasa and critical applications? 1) Software engineering (if we take that to mean the conventional repertoire of techniques taught as SE) is relevant to any project that gets up above a certain size, but it is less important when the project is much smaller, serves a more exploratory function, or where the design is constantly changing. To this extent I agree with Pei's comments. 2) If you are looking beyond the idea of simply grabbing some SE techniques off the shelf, and are instead asking if SE can have an impact on AGI, then the answer is a dramatic Yes!. Why? Because tools determine the way that we *can* think about things. Tools shape our thoughts. They can sometimes enable us to think in new ways that were simply not possible before the tools were invented. I decided a long time ago that if cognitive scientists had easy-to-use use tools that enabled them to construct realistic components of thinking systems, their entire style of explanation would be revolutionized. Right now, cog sci people cannot afford the time to be both cog sci experts *and* sophisticated software developers, so they have to make do with programming that is, by and large, trivially simple. This determines the kinds of models and explanations they can come up with. (Ditto in spades for the neuroscientists, by the way). So, the more global answer to your question is that nothing could be more important for AGI than software engineering. The problem is, that the kind of software engineering we are talking about is not a matter of grabbing SE components off the shelf, but asking what the needs of cognitive scientists and AGIers might be, and then inventing new techniques and tools that will give these people the ability to think about intelligent systems in new ways. That is why I am working on Safaire. 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/?; https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org mailto:b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modify https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Your Subscription [Powered by Listbox] http
Robots with a sense of touch [WAS Re: [agi] AGI Preschool....]
Philip Hunt wrote: 2008/12/20 Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org: Well, there is massively more $$ going into robotics dev than into AGI dev, and no one seems remotely near to solving the hard problems Which is not to say it's a bad area of research, just that it's a whole other huge confusing RD can of worms So I still say, the choices are -- virtual embodiment, as I advocate -- delay working on AGI for a decade or so, and work on robotics now instead (where by robotics I include software work on low-level sensing and actuator control) Either choice makes sense but I prefer the former as I think it can get us to the end goal faster. That makes sense But, with actuation, I'm not so sure. The almost total absence of touch and kinesthetics in current robots is a huge impediment, and puts them at a huge disadvantage relative to humans. Good point. I wonder how easy it would be to provide a robot with a sensor that gives a sense of touch? maybe something the thickness of a sheet of paper, with horizontal and vertical wires criss-crossing it, and the wires not electrically connected would work, if there was a difference in capacitance when the wires where further apart or closer together. How about: http://www.geekologie.com/2006/06/nanoparticles_give_robots_prec.php or http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=163701010 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Cross-Cultural Discussion using English [WAS Re: [agi] Creativity ...]
Ben Goertzel wrote: yeah ... that's not a matter of the English language but rather a matter of the American Way ;-p Through working with many non-Americans I have noted that what Americans often intend as a playful obnoxiousness is interpreted by non-Americans more seriously... Except that, in fact, Mike is not American but British. As a result of long experience talking to Americans, I have discovered that what British people intend as routine discussion, Americans interpret as serious, intentional obnoxiousness. And then, what Americans (as you say) intend as playful obnoxiousness, non-Americans interpret more seriously. Richard Loosemore I think we had some mutual colleagues in the past who favored such a style of discourse ;-) ben On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 1:49 PM, Pei Wang mail.peiw...@gmail.com mailto:mail.peiw...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 1:40 PM, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org mailto:b...@goertzel.org wrote: IMHO, Mike Tintner is not often rude, and is not exactly a troll because I feel he is genuinely trying to understand the deeper issues related to AGI, rather than mainly trying to stir up trouble or cause irritation Well, I guess my English is not good enough to tell the subtle difference in tones, but his comments often sound that You AGIers are so obviously wrong that I don't even bother to understand what you are saying ... Now let me tell you I don't enjoy this tone. Pei --- 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=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: Cross-Cultural Discussion using English [WAS Re: [agi] Creativity ...]
Pei Wang wrote: Richard and Ben, If you think I, as a Chinese, have overreacted to Mike Tintner's writing style, and this is just a culture difference, please let me know. In that case I'll try my best to learn his way of communication, at least when talking to British and American people --- who knows, it may even improve my marketing ability. ;-) Pei No, no: I seriously do not think you have overreacted at all. I meant my comment half in jest: Mike has some unique abilities to rub people up the wrong way on this list, quite separate from the fact that he is British. The latter is an exacerbating factor, is all. Richard Loosemore On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 7:01 PM, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org wrote: And when a Chinese doesn't answer a question, it usually means No ;-) Relatedly, I am discussing with some US gov't people a potential project involving customizing an AI reasoning system to emulate the different inferential judgments of people from different cultures... ben On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 5:29 PM, Richard Loosemore r...@lightlink.com wrote: Ben Goertzel wrote: yeah ... that's not a matter of the English language but rather a matter of the American Way ;-p Through working with many non-Americans I have noted that what Americans often intend as a playful obnoxiousness is interpreted by non-Americans more seriously... Except that, in fact, Mike is not American but British. As a result of long experience talking to Americans, I have discovered that what British people intend as routine discussion, Americans interpret as serious, intentional obnoxiousness. And then, what Americans (as you say) intend as playful obnoxiousness, non-Americans interpret more seriously. Richard Loosemore I think we had some mutual colleagues in the past who favored such a style of discourse ;-) ben On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 1:49 PM, Pei Wang mail.peiw...@gmail.com mailto:mail.peiw...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 1:40 PM, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org mailto:b...@goertzel.org wrote: IMHO, Mike Tintner is not often rude, and is not exactly a troll because I feel he is genuinely trying to understand the deeper issues related to AGI, rather than mainly trying to stir up trouble or cause irritation Well, I guess my English is not good enough to tell the subtle difference in tones, but his comments often sound that You AGIers are so obviously wrong that I don't even bother to understand what you are saying ... Now let me tell you I don't enjoy this tone. Pei --- 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 -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx 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/?; 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=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Building a machine that can learn from experience
Ben Goertzel wrote: Colin, It is of course possible that human intelligence relies upon electromagnetic-field sensing that goes beyond the traditional five senses. OR, it might all be a quantum multicosmic phenomenon that is best explained with a dose of Evenedrician Datonomy |-) 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Building a machine that can learn from experience
Rafael C.P. wrote: Cognitive computing: Building a machine that can learn from experience http://www.physorg.com/news148754667.html Neuroscience vaporware. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] CopyCat
Vladimir Nesov wrote: On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 6:03 PM, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org wrote: I happened to use CopyCat in a university AI class I taught years ago, so I got some experience with it It was **great** as a teaching tool, but I wouldn't say it shows anything about what can or can't work for AGI, really... CopyCat gives a general feel of self-assembling representation and operations performed on reflexive level. It captures intuitions about high-level perception better than any other self-contained description I've seen (which is rather sad, especially given that CopyCat only touches on using hand-made shallow multilevel representations, without inventing them, without learning). Some of the things happening in my model of high-level representation (on the rights of description of what's happening, not as elements of model itself) can be naturally described using lexicon from CopyCat (slippages, temperature, salience, structural analogy), even though algorithm on the low level is different. I agree with your sentiments about CopyCat (and its cousins). It is not so much that it delivers specific performance by itself, so much as it is a different way to think about how to do such things: an inspiration for a whole class of models. It is certainly part of the inspiration for my system. Sounded to me like Ben's initial disparaging remarks about CopyCat were mostly the result of a BHDE (a Bad Hair Day Event). It *really* is not that useless. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: FW: [agi] Lamarck Lives!(?)
Eric Burton wrote: It's all a big vindication for genetic memory, that's for certain. I was comfortable with the notion of certain templates, archetypes, being handed down as aspects of brain design via natural selection, but this really clears the way for organisms' life experiences to simply be copied in some form to their offspring. DNA form! It is scary to imagine memes scribbling on your genome in this way. Food for thought! :O Well, no: that was not the conclusion that we came to during this thread. I think we all agreed that although we could imagine ways in which some acquired information could be passed on through the DNA, the *current* evidence does not indicate that large scale transfer of memories is happening. In effect, the recent discoveries might conceivably allow nature to hand over to the next generation a 3.5 inch floppy disk (remember those?) with some data on it, whereas the implication in what you just said was that this floppy disk could be used to transfer the contents of the Googleplex :-). Not so fast, I say. Richard Loosemore On 12/11/08, Terren Suydam ba...@yahoo.com wrote: After talking to an old professor of mine, it bears mentioning that epigenetic mechanisms such as methylation and histone remodeling are not the only means of altering transcription. A long established mechanism involves phosphorylation of transcription factors in the neuron (phosphorylation is a way of chemically enabling or disabling the function of a particular enzyme). In light of that I think there is some fuzziness around the use of epigenetic here because you could conceivably consider the above phosphorylation mechanism as epigenetic - functionally speaking, the effect is the same - an increase or decrease in transcription. The only difference between that and methylation etc is transience: phosphorylation of transcription factors is less permanent then altering the DNA. He also shed some light on the effects on synapses due to epigenetic mechanisms. Ed, you were wondering how synapse-specific changes could occur in response to transcription mechanisms (which are central to the neuron). Specifically: There are 2 possible answers to that puzzle (that I am aware of); 1) evidence of mRNA and translation machinery present in dendrites at the site of synapses (see papers published by Oswald Steward or 2) activity causes a specific synapse to be 'tagged' so that newly synthesized proteins in the cell body are targeted specifically to the tagged synapses. Terren --- On Thu, 12/11/08, Ed Porter ewpor...@msn.com wrote: From: Ed Porter ewpor...@msn.com Subject: FW: [agi] Lamarck Lives!(?) To: agi@v2.listbox.com Date: Thursday, December 11, 2008, 10:32 AM I To save you the trouble the most relevant language from the below cited article is While scientists don't yet know exactly how epigenetic regulation affects memory, the theory is that certain triggers, such as exercise, visual stimulation, or drugs, unwind DNA, allowing expression of genes involved in neural plasticity. That increase in gene expression might trigger development of new neural connections and, in turn, strengthen the neural circuits that underlie memory formation. Maybe our brains are using these epigenetic mechanisms to allow us to learn and remember things, or to provide sufficient plasticity to allow us to learn and adapt, says John Satterlee, program director of epigenetics at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, in Bethesda, MD. We have solid evidence that HDAC inhibitors massively promote growth of dendrites and increase synaptogenesis [the creation of connections between neurons], says Tsai. The process may boost memory or allow mice to regain access to lost memories by rewiring or repairing damaged neural circuits. We believe the memory trace is still there, but the animal cannot retrieve it due to damage to neural circuits, she adds. -Original Message- From: Ed Porter [mailto:ewpor...@msn.com] Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2008 10:28 AM To: 'agi@v2.listbox.com' Subject: FW: [agi] Lamarck Lives!(?) An article related to how changes in the epigenonme could affect learning and memory (the subject which started this thread a week ago) http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/21801/ 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/?; 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
[agi] Religious attitudes to NBIC technologies
Another indication that we need to take the public relations issue very seriously indeed: as time passes, this problem of the public attitude (and especially the religious attitude) to NBIC technologies will only become more extreme: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7767192.stm 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Seeking CYC critiques
Steve Richfield wrote: Matt, On 12/6/08, *Matt Mahoney* [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- On Sat, 12/6/08, Steve Richfield [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Internet AGIs are the technology of the future, and always will be. There will NEVER EVER in a million years be a thinking Internet silicon intelligence that will be able to solve substantial real-world problems based only on what exists on the Internet. I think that my prior email was pretty much a closed-form proof of that. However, there are MUCH simpler methods that work TODAY, given the metadata that is presently missing from the Internet. The internet has about 10^14 to 10^15 bits of knowledge as searchable text. AGI requires 10^17 to 10^18 bits. This presumes that there isn't some sort of agent at work that filters a particular important type of information, so that even a googol of text wouldn't be any closer. As I keep explaining, that agent is there and working well, to filter the two things that I keep mentioning. Hence, you are WRONG here. If we assume that the internet doubles every 1.5 to 2 years with Moore's Law, then we should have enough knowledge in 15-20 years. Unfortunately, I won't double my own postings, and few others will double their own output. Sure, there will be some additional enlargement of the Internet, but its growth is linear once past its introduction, which we are, and short of exponential growth of population, which is on a scale of a century or so. In short, Moore's law simply doesn't apply here, any more than 9 women can make a baby in a month. However, much of this new knowledge is video, so we also need to solve vision and speech along with language. Which of course has been stymied by the lack of metadata - my point all along. While VERY interesting, your proposal appears to leave the following important questions unanswered: 1. How is it an AGI? I suppose this is a matter of definitions. It looks to me more like a protocol. AGI means automating the economy so we don't have to work. It means not just solving the language and vision problems, but also training the equivalent of 10^10 humans to make money for us. After hardware costs come down, custom training for specialized roles will be the major expense. I proposed surveillance as the cheapest way for AGI to learn what we want. A cheaper alternative might be brain scanning, but we have not yet developed the technology. (It will be worth US$1 quadrillion if you can do it). Or another way to answer your question, AGI is a lot of dumb specialists plus an infrastructure to route messages to the right experts. I suspect that your definition here is unique. Perhaps other on this forum would like to proclaim which of us is right/wrong. Since you ask, the two of you seem to be competing for the prize of largest number of most diabolically nonsensical comments in the shortest amount of time. You *did* ask. I thought that the definition more or less included an intelligent *_computer_*. 2. As I explained earlier on this thread, all human-human languages have severe semantic limitations, such that (applying this to your porposal), only very rarely will there ever exist an answer that PRECISELY answers a question, so some sort of acceptable error must go into the equation. In the example you used in your paper, Jupiter is NOT the largest planet that is known, as the astronomers have identified larger planets in other solar systems. There may be a good solution to this, e.g. provide the 3 best answers that are semantically disjoint. People communicate in natural language 100 to 1000 times faster than any artificial language, in spite of its supposed limitations. Remember that the limiting cost is transferring knowledge from human brains to AGI, 10^17 to 10^18 bits at 2 bits per second per person. Unfortunately, when societal or perceptual filters are involved, there will remain HUGE holes in even an infinite body of data. Of course, our society has its problems precisely because of those holes, so more data doesn't necessarily get you any further. As for Jupiter, any question you ask is going to get more than one answer. This is not a new problem. http://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+the+largest+planet%3F In my proposal, peers compete for reputation and have a financial incentive to provide useful information to avoid being blocked or ignored in an economy where information has negative value. Great! At least that way, I know that the things I see will be good Christian content. This is why it is important for an AGI protocol to provide for secure authentication. 3. Your paper addresses question answering, which as I have explained here in the
[agi] Lamarck Lives!(?)
Am I right in thinking that what these people: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026845.000-memories-may-be-stored-on-your-dna.html are saying is that memories can be stored as changes in the DNA inside neurons? If so, that would upset a few apple carts. Would it mean that memories (including cultural adaptations) could be passed from mother to child? Implication for neuroscientists proposing to build a WBE (whole brain emulation): the resolution you need may now have to include all the DNA in every neuron. Any bets on when they will have the resolution to do that? 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Lamarck Lives!(?)
Interesting. Note, however, that it is conceivable that those other examples of plant and bacterial adaptation could be explained as situation-specific - in the sense that the particular cause of the adaptation could have worked in ways that were not generalizable to other, similar factors. So, some very specific factors could be inherited while others could never have an effect because they just don't happen to affect methylation. But if the neural results hold up, this would be a whole new ball game: a completely general mechanism for storing memories in an inheritable form. Not just [memory-for-your-first-kiss] affecting the DNA, but the whole shebang. If it turns out that this is the correct interpretation, then this is one hell of a historic moment. I must say, I am still a little skeptical, but we'll see how it plays out. Richard Loosemore Ben Goertzel wrote: Note also, http://sciencelinks.jp/j-east/article/200308/20030803A0129895.php Jean Baptiste de Lamarck (1744-1829) maintained that characteristics that were acquired during an organism's lifetime are passed on to its offspring. This theory, known as Lamarckian inheritance, was later completely discredited. However, recent progress in epigenetics research suggests it needs to be reexamined in consideration of DNA methylation. In this article, I summarize our observations, which support Lamarckian inheritance. Initial experiments indicate that (1) artificially induced demethylation of rice genomic DNA results in heritable dwarfism, and (2) cold stress induces extensive demethylation in somatic cells of the maize root. Based on these results, I propose the hypothesis that traits that are acquired during plant growth are sometimes inherited by their progeny through persistent alteration of the DNA methylation status. (author abst.) I wonder how this relates to adaptive mutagenesis http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1206667 which has been rather controversial http://www.genetics.org/cgi/content/full/165/4/2319 ben On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 11:11 AM, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Am I right in thinking that what these people: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026845.000-memories-may-be-stored-on-your-dna.html are saying is that memories can be stored as changes in the DNA inside neurons? If so, that would upset a few apple carts. Would it mean that memories (including cultural adaptations) could be passed from mother to child? Implication for neuroscientists proposing to build a WBE (whole brain emulation): the resolution you need may now have to include all the DNA in every neuron. Any bets on when they will have the resolution to do that? 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=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Lamarck Lives!(?)
Harry Chesley wrote: On 12/3/2008 8:11 AM, Richard Loosemore wrote: Am I right in thinking that what these people: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026845.000-memories-may-be-stored-on-your-dna.html are saying is that memories can be stored as changes in the DNA inside neurons? If so, that would upset a few apple carts. Yes, but it obviously needs a lot more confirmation first. :-) Would it mean that memories (including cultural adaptations) could be passed from mother to child? No. As far as I understand it, they are proposing changes to the DNA in the neural cells only, so it wouldn't be passed on. And I would expect that the changes are specific to the neural structure of the subject, so even if you moved the changes to DNA in another subject, it wouldn't work. You're right, of course. But if this holds up, it would not be quite so crazy to imagine a mechanism that uses junk DNA signalling to get the end caps of the genital DNA to reflect the changes. I admit, though, this is stretching it a bit ;-). As for the changes not working in another subject: yes, it would probably be the case that specific memories are encoded in an individual-specific way. But what about more general factors? What if there were some primitive types of musical understanding, say, that were common across individuals, for example? Like, a set of very primitive concepts having to do with links between sounds and finger movements? If such general factors could be passed across, a person could inherit above average musical ability because their parents had been active musicians all their lives. All this is fun to think about, but I confess I am mostly playing devil's advocate here. Implication for neuroscientists proposing to build a WBE (whole brain emulation): the resolution you need may now have to include all the DNA in every neuron. Any bets on when they will have the resolution to do that? No bets here. But they are proposing that elements are added onto the DNA, not that changes are made in arbitrary locations within the DNA, so it's not /quite/ as bad as you suggest It would be pretty embarrassing for people gearing up for scans with a limiting resolution at about the size of one neuron, though. IIRC that was the rough order of magnitude assumed in the proposal I reviewed here recently. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Lamarck Lives!(?)
Philip Hunt wrote: 2008/12/3 Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED]: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026845.000-memories-may-be-stored-on-your-dna.html are saying is that memories can be stored as changes in the DNA inside neurons? No. They are saying memories might be stored as changes *on* the DNA. Imagine a big long DNA molecule. It has little molecules attached to bits of it, which regulate which genes are and aren't expressed. That's how a cell knows it's a skin cell, or an eye cell or a liver cell. Apparently the same mechanism is used in neurons are part of the mechanism for laying down new memories. Yes, I know this: I appreciate the difference between tampering with the gene regulation apparatus and affecting the codons themselves, but for my money, *any* mechanism that collects synaptic signals (to speak very broadly) and then walks over to some DNA and does anything systematic to the DNA, to record the results of those signals, is storing something on the DNA. There could have been no way to get from one to the other, but now it appears that there is. Would it mean that memories (including cultural adaptations) could be passed from mother to child? No, for two reasons: (1) the DNA isn't being changed. (2) even if the DNA was being changed, it isn't in the germ-line. This is a crucial point: has anyone definitely ruled out the possibility that state of the gene regulation apparatus could somehow affect the germ line? This I am not clear about. When the Mom and Pop DNA really start to get down and boogie together, do they throw away the scratchpad that contains all the extra information about the state of the junk DNA, the methylation endcaps, etc? Or is it still an open question whether some of that can carry over? 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Lamarck Lives!(?)
Terren Suydam wrote: Hi Richard, Thanks for the link, pretty intriguing. It's important to note that the mechanism proposed is just a switch that turns specific genes off... so properly understood, it's likely that the resolution required to model this mechanism would not necessarily require modeling the entire DNA strand. It seems more likely that these methylation caps are being applied to very specific genes that produce proteins heavily implicated in the dynamics of synapse creation/destruction (or some other process related to memory). So modeling the phenomenon could very possibly be done functionally. Memories could only be passed to the child if 1) those DNA changes were also made in the germ cells (i.e. egg/sperm) and 2) the DNA changes involved resulted in a brain organization in the child that mimicked the parent's brain. (1) is very unlikely but theoretically possible; (2) is impossible for two reasons. One is, the methylation patterns proposed involve a large number of neurons, converging on a pattern of methylation; in contrast, a germ cell would only capture the methylation of a single cell (which would then be cloned in the developing fetus). Second, the hypothesized methylation patterns represent a different medium of information storage in the mature brain than what is normally considered to be the role of DNA in the developing brain. It would truly be a huge leap to suggest that the information stored via this alteration of DNA would result in that information being preserved somehow in a developing brain. There are plenty of other epigenetic phenomena to get Lamarck fans excited, but this isn't one of them. I see what you are saying. I really want to distance myself from this a little bit (don't want to seem like I am really holding the banner for Lamarck's crowd), but I think the main conclusion that we can draw from this piece of research is, as I said a moment ago, that we now have reason to believe that there is *some* mechanism that connects memories to DNA modifications, whereas if anyone had suggested such a link a few years ago they would have been speculating on thin ice. I definitely agree that getting from there to a situation in which packages of information are being inserted into germ cell DNA is a long road, but this one new piece of research has - surprisingly - just cut the length of that road in half. All fun and interesting, but now back to the real AGI 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Lamarck Lives!(?)
Terren Suydam wrote: I definitely agree that getting from there to a situation in which packages of information are being inserted into germ cell DNA is a long road, but this one new piece of research has - surprisingly - just cut the length of that road in half. Half of infinity is still infinity ;-] It's just not a possibility, which should be obvious if you look at the quantity of information involved. Let M be a measure of the information stored via distributed methylation patterns across some number of neurons N. The amount of information stored by a single neuron's methylated DNA is going to be much smaller than M (roughly M/N). A single germ cell which might conceivably inherit the methylation pattern from some single neuron would not be able to convey any more than a [1/N] piece of the total information that makes up M. Now you're just trying to make me think ;-). Okay, try this. [heck, you don't have to: I am just playing with ideas here...] 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). 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. 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. The same episode is stored in multiple neurons, but each copy is complete. When we observe changes in the methylation patterns, perhaps these are just part of the transit mechanism, not the final destination for the pattern. To put it in the language that Greg Bear would use, the endcaps were just part of the radio system. (http://www.gregbear.com/books/darwinsradio.cfm) Now suppose that part of the junk sequences that code for these memories are actually using a distributed coding scheme *within* the strand (in the manner of a good old fashioned backprop neural net, shall we say). That would mean that, contrary to what I said in the above paragraph, the individual strands were coding a bunch of different episodic memory traces, not just one. (It is even possible that the old idea of flashbulb memories may survive the critiques that have been launched against it ... and in that case, it could be that what we are talking about here is the mechanism for storing that particular set of memories. And in that case, perhaps the system expects so few of them, that all DNA strands everywhere in the system are dedicated to storing just the individual's store of flashbulb memories). Now, finally, suppose that there is some mechanism for radioing these memories to distribute them around the system ... and that the radio network extends as far as the germ DNA. Now, the offspring could get the mixed flashbulb memories of its parents, in perhaps very dilute or noisy form. This assumes that whatever coding scheme is used to store the information can somehow transcend the coding schemes used by different individuals. Since we do not yet know how much common ground there is between the knowledge storage used by individuals yet, this is still possible. There: I invented a possible mechanism. Does it work? 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Lamarck Lives!(?)
Ben Goertzel wrote: I know you're just playing here but it would be easy to empirically test this. Does junk DNA change between birth and death? Something tells me we would have discovered something that significant a long time ago. Terren well, loads of mutations occur in nuclear DNA between birth and death; this is part of how aging occurs. There are specific DNA repair mechanisms that fix mutation errors that occur during the cell's lifetime It seems quite plausible that these repair mechanisms might work differently on coding and noncoding regions of the DNA Ah, hang on folks: what I was meaning was that the *state* of the junk DNA was being used, not the code. I am referring to the stuff that is dynamically interacting, as a result of which genes are switched on and off all over the place so this is a gigantic network of switches. I wouldn't suggest that something is snipping and recombining the actual code of the junk DNA, only that the state of the switches is being used to code for something. Question is: can the state of the switches be preserved during reproduction? 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] AIXI (was: Mushed Up Decision Processes)
Philip Hunt wrote: 2008/11/29 Matt Mahoney [EMAIL PROTECTED]: The general problem of detecting overfitting is not computable. The principle according to Occam's Razor, formalized and proven by Hutter's AIXI model, is to choose the shortest program (simplest hypothesis) that generates the data. Overfitting is the case of choosing a program that is too large. Can someone explain AIXI to me? My understanding is that you've got some black-box process emitting output, and you generate all possible programs that emit the same output, then choose the shortest one. You then run this program and its subsequent output is what you predict the black-box process will do. This has the minor drawback, of course, that it requires infinite processing power and is therefore slightly impractical. I've read Hutter's paper Universal algorithmic intelligence, A mathematical top-down approach which amusingly describes itself as a gentle introduction to the AIXI model. Hutter also describes AIXItl of computation time Ord(t*2^L) where I assume L is the length of the program and I'm not sure what t is. Is AIXItl something that could be practically written or is it purely a theoretical construct? In short, is there something to AIXI or is it something I can safely ignore? It is something that, if you do not ignore it, will waste every second of brain cpu time that you devote to it ;-). Matt comes has a habit of repeating some version of the above statement ... according to Occam's Razor, [which was] formalized and proven by Hutter's AIXI model... on a semi-periodic basis. The first n times I took the trouble to explain why this statement is nonsense. Now I don't bother. AIXI is mathematical abstraction taken to the point of absurdity and beyond. By introducing infinite numbers of copies of all possible universes into your formalism, and by implying that functions can be computed on such structures, and by redefining common terms like intelligence to be abstractions based on that formalism, you can prove anything under the sun. That fact seems to escape some people. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
Ben Goertzel wrote: Richard, It might be more useful to discuss more recent papers by the same authors regarding the same topic, such as the more accurately-titled *** Sparse but not Grandmother-cell coding in the medial temporal lobe. Quian Quiroga R, Kreiman G, Koch C and Fried I. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 12: 87-91; 2008 *** at http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/engineering/extranet/research-groups/neuroengineering-lab/ There are always more papers that can be discussed. But that does not change the fact that we provided arguments to back up our claims, when we analyzed the original Quiroga et al paper, and all the criticism directed against our paper on this list, in the last week or so, has completely ignored the actual content of that argument. Richard Loosemore On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 1:32 PM, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ben Goertzel wrote: Hi, BTW, I just read this paper For example, in Loosemore Harley (in press) you can find an analysis of a paper by Quiroga, Reddy, Kreiman, Koch, and Fried (2005) in which the latter try to claim they have evidence in favor of grandmother neurons (or sparse collections of grandmother neurons) and against the idea of distributed representations. which I found at http://www.vis.caltech.edu/~rodri/ and I strongly disagree that We showed their conclusion to be incoherent. It was deeply implausible, given the empirical data they reported. The claim that Harley and I made - which you quote above - was the *conclusion* sentence that summarized a detailed explanation of our reasoning. That reasoning was in our original paper, and I also went to the trouble of providing a longer version of it in one of my last posts on this thread. I showed, in that argument, that their claims about sparse vs distributed representations were incoherent, because they had not thought through the implications contained in their own words - part of which you quote below. Merely quoting their words again, without resolving the inconsistencies that we pointed out, proves nothing. We analyzed that paper because it was one of several that engendered a huge amount of publicity. All of that publicity - which, as far as we can see, the authors did not have any problem with - had to do with the claims about grandmother cells, sparseness and distributed representations. Nobody - not I, not Harley, and nobody else as far as I know - disputes that the empirical data were interesting, but that is not the point: we attacked their paper because of their conclusion about the theoretical issue of sparse vs distributed representations, and the wider issue about grandmother cells. In that context, it is not true that, as you put it below, the authors only [claimed] to have gathered some information on empirical constraints on how neural knowledge representation may operate. They went beyond just claiming that they had gathered some relevant data: they tried to say what that data implied. Richard Loosemore Their conclusion, to quote them, is that How neurons encode different percepts is one of the most intriguing questions in neuroscience. Two extreme hypotheses are schemes based on the explicit representations by highly selective (cardinal, gnostic or grandmother) neurons and schemes that rely on an implicit representation over a very broad and distributed population of neurons1–4,6. In the latter case, recognition would require the simultaneous activation of a large number of cells and therefore we would expect each cell to respond to many pictures with similar basic features. This is in contrast to the sparse firing we observe, because most MTL cells do not respond to the great majority of images seen by the patient. Furthermore, cells signal a particular individual or object in an explicit manner27, in the sense that the presence of the individual can, in principle, be reliably decoded from a very small number of neurons.We do not mean to imply the existence of single neurons coding uniquely for discrete percepts for several reasons: first, some of these units responded to pictures of more than one individual or object; second, given the limited duration of our recording sessions, we can only explore a tiny portion of stimulus space; and third, the fact that we can discover in this short time some images—such as photographs of Jennifer Aniston—that drive the cells suggests that each cell might represent more than one class of images. Yet, this subset of MTL cells is selectively activated by different views of individuals, landmarks, animals or objects. This is quite distinct from a completely distributed population code and suggests a sparse, explicit and invariant encoding of visual percepts in MTL. The only thing that bothers me about the paper is that the title Invariant visual representation by single neurons in the human brain does not actually reflect the conclusions drawn. A title like Invariant visual
Re: [agi] who is going to build the wittgenstein-ian AI filter to spot all the intellectual nonsense
Tudor Boloni wrote: we invariably generate and then fruitlessly explore (our field is even more exposed to this than most others) until we come up against the limits of our own language, and defeated and fatigued realize we never thought the questions through. i nominate this guy: http://hyperlogic.blogspot.com/ at a minimum wittgenstein's Brown Book should be required reading for all AGI list members Read it. Along with pretty much everything else he wrote (that is in print, anyhow). Calling things a category error is a bit of a cop out. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] who is going to build the wittgenstein-ian AI filter to spot all the intellectual nonsense
Tudor Boloni wrote: wrong category is trivial indeed, but quickly removing computing resources from impossible processes can be a great benefit to any system, and an incredible benefit if the system learns to spot deeply nonsensical problems in advance of dedicating almost any resources to it... what if we could design a system that by its very structuring couldnt even generate these wittgensteinian deep errors... also, as far it being a cop out, i disagree it clears the mind to the deepest levels allowing a springwell of clarity that shows other answers in record time and accuracy, an example: minsky points to the same stupidity of asking the question of what is consciousness, preferring to just look for stimuli/behavior rules that are required to survive and act, and letting others worry about how many of those rules make up their version of the word conscious... The problem with this is, that what seemed to Wittgenstein and Minsky (when they had their Philosophical Behaviorist hats on) as just meaningless words that referred to nothing (e.g. consciousness) may well turn out to have deeper and more interesting structure than they thought. For example, they could not, in principle, answer any questions about the practical effects of the various manipulations that I proposed in my recent paper. And yet, it turns out that I can make predictions about how the subjective experience of people would be affected by these manipulations: pretty good work for something that is labelled by W M as a non-concept! My point of course, is that they were wrong about some of the specific things that would be a waste of time for an AGI to think about. They were right in principle to say that some questions are framed badly (as in, But now show me where the University is!), but it would be dangerous to assume that we can sort the wheat from the chaff and get it right every time, no? Richard Loosemore On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 3:46 PM, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Tudor Boloni wrote: we invariably generate and then fruitlessly explore (our field is even more exposed to this than most others) until we come up against the limits of our own language, and defeated and fatigued realize we never thought the questions through. i nominate this guy: http://hyperlogic.blogspot.com/ at a minimum wittgenstein's Brown Book should be required reading for all AGI list members Read it. Along with pretty much everything else he wrote (that is in print, anyhow). Calling things a category error is a bit of a cop out. 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/?; https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modify https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Your Subscription [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=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
Ben Goertzel wrote: http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/engineering/extranet/research-groups/neuroengineering-lab/ There are always more papers that can be discussed. OK, sure, but this is a more recent paper **by the same authors, discussing the same data*** and more recent similar data. But that does not change the fact that we provided arguments to back up our claims, when we analyzed the original Quiroga et al paper, and all the criticism directed against our paper on this list, in the last week or so, has completely ignored the actual content of that argument. My question is how your arguments apply to their more recent paper discussing the same data It seems to me that their original paper was somewhat sloppy in the theoretical discussion accompanying the impressive data, and you largely correctly picked on their sloppy theoretical discussion ... and now, their more recent works have cleaned up much of the sloppiness of their earlier theoretical discussions. Do you disagree with this? Nope, don't disagree: I just haven't had time to look at their paper yet. It's not very interesting to me to dissect the sloppy theoretical discussion at the end of an experimental paper from a few years ago. What is more interesting to me is whether the core ideas underlying the researchers' work are somehow flawed. If their earlier discussion was sloppy and was pushed back on by their peers, leading to a clearer theoretical discussion in their current papers, then that means that the scientific community is basically doing what it's supposed to do That is fine. But when evaluating our particular critique, it is only fair to keep it in its proper context. We set out to pick a collection of the most widely publicized neuroscience papers, to see how they looked from the point of view of a sophisticated understanding of cognitive science. Our conclusion was that, TAKEN AS A WHOLE, this set of representative papers were interpreting their results in ways that not very coherent. Rather than advancing the cause of cognitive science, they were turning the clock back to an era when we knew very little about what might be going on. If Quiroga et al do a better job now, then that is all to the good. But Harley and I had a broader perspective, and we feel that the overall standards are pretty low. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] who is going to build the wittgenstein-ian AI filter to spot all the intellectual nonsense
Tudor Boloni wrote: Richard, please give me a link to the paper or at least the example related to manipulation of subjective experience in others, i am indeed curious to see how their approach would fare... thanks for the effort in advance Sure thing: http://susaro.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/draft_consciousness_rpwl.pdf 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
Ben Goertzel wrote: Hi, BTW, I just read this paper For example, in Loosemore Harley (in press) you can find an analysis of a paper by Quiroga, Reddy, Kreiman, Koch, and Fried (2005) in which the latter try to claim they have evidence in favor of grandmother neurons (or sparse collections of grandmother neurons) and against the idea of distributed representations. which I found at http://www.vis.caltech.edu/~rodri/ and I strongly disagree that We showed their conclusion to be incoherent. It was deeply implausible, given the empirical data they reported. The claim that Harley and I made - which you quote above - was the *conclusion* sentence that summarized a detailed explanation of our reasoning. That reasoning was in our original paper, and I also went to the trouble of providing a longer version of it in one of my last posts on this thread. I showed, in that argument, that their claims about sparse vs distributed representations were incoherent, because they had not thought through the implications contained in their own words - part of which you quote below. Merely quoting their words again, without resolving the inconsistencies that we pointed out, proves nothing. We analyzed that paper because it was one of several that engendered a huge amount of publicity. All of that publicity - which, as far as we can see, the authors did not have any problem with - had to do with the claims about grandmother cells, sparseness and distributed representations. Nobody - not I, not Harley, and nobody else as far as I know - disputes that the empirical data were interesting, but that is not the point: we attacked their paper because of their conclusion about the theoretical issue of sparse vs distributed representations, and the wider issue about grandmother cells. In that context, it is not true that, as you put it below, the authors only [claimed] to have gathered some information on empirical constraints on how neural knowledge representation may operate. They went beyond just claiming that they had gathered some relevant data: they tried to say what that data implied. Richard Loosemore Their conclusion, to quote them, is that How neurons encode different percepts is one of the most intriguing questions in neuroscience. Two extreme hypotheses are schemes based on the explicit representations by highly selective (cardinal, gnostic or grandmother) neurons and schemes that rely on an implicit representation over a very broad and distributed population of neurons1–4,6. In the latter case, recognition would require the simultaneous activation of a large number of cells and therefore we would expect each cell to respond to many pictures with similar basic features. This is in contrast to the sparse firing we observe, because most MTL cells do not respond to the great majority of images seen by the patient. Furthermore, cells signal a particular individual or object in an explicit manner27, in the sense that the presence of the individual can, in principle, be reliably decoded from a very small number of neurons.We do not mean to imply the existence of single neurons coding uniquely for discrete percepts for several reasons: first, some of these units responded to pictures of more than one individual or object; second, given the limited duration of our recording sessions, we can only explore a tiny portion of stimulus space; and third, the fact that we can discover in this short time some images—such as photographs of Jennifer Aniston—that drive the cells suggests that each cell might represent more than one class of images. Yet, this subset of MTL cells is selectively activated by different views of individuals, landmarks, animals or objects. This is quite distinct from a completely distributed population code and suggests a sparse, explicit and invariant encoding of visual percepts in MTL. The only thing that bothers me about the paper is that the title Invariant visual representation by single neurons in the human brain does not actually reflect the conclusions drawn. A title like Invariant visual representation by sparse neuronal population encodings the human brain would have reflected their actual conclusions a lot better. But the paper's conclusion clearly says We do not mean to imply the existence of single neurons coding uniquely for discrete percepts for several reasons: I see some incoherence between the title and the paper's contents, which is a bit frustrating, but no incoherence in the paper's conclusion, nor between the data and the conclusion. According to what the paper says, the authors do not claim to have solve the neural knowledge representation problem, but only to have gathered some information on empirical constraints on how neural knowledge representation may operate. -- Ben G --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
Steve Richfield wrote: Richard, On 11/20/08, *Richard Loosemore* [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Steve Richfield wrote: Richard, Broad agreement, with one comment from the end of your posting... On 11/20/08, *Richard Loosemore* [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Another, closely related thing that they do is talk about low level issues witout realizing just how disconnected those are from where the real story (probably) lies. Thus, Mohdra emphasizes the importance of spike timing as opposed to average firing rate. There are plenty of experiments that show that consecutive closely-spaced pulses result when something goes off scale, probably the equivalent to computing Bayesian probabilities 100%, somewhat akin to the overflow light on early analog computers. These closely-spaced pulses have a MUCH larger post-synaptic effect than the same number of regularly spaced pulses. However, as far as I know, this only occurs during anomalous situations - maybe when something really new happens, that might trigger learning? IMHO, it is simply not possible to play this game without having a close friend with years of experience poking mammalian neurons. This stuff is simply NOT in the literature. He may well be right that the pattern or the timing is more important, but IMO he is doing the equivalent of saying Let's talk about the best way to design an algorithm to control an airport. First problem to solve: should we use Emitter-Coupled Logic in the transistors that are in oour computers that will be running the algorithms. Still, even with my above comments, you conclusion is still correct. The main problem is that if you interpret spike timing to be playing the role that you (and they) imply above, then you are commiting yourself to a whole raft of assumptions about how knowledge is generally represented and processed. However, there are *huge* problems with that set of implicit assumptions not to put too fine a point on it, those implicit assumptions are equivalent to the worst, most backward kind of cognitive theory imaginable. A theory that is 30 or 40 years out of date. OK, so how else do you explain that in fairly well understood situations like stretch receptors, that the rate indicates the stretch UNLESS you exceed the mechanical limit of the associated joint, whereupon you start getting pulse doublets, triplets, etc. Further, these pulse groups have a HUGE effect on post synaptic neurons. What does your cognitive science tell you about THAT? See my parallel reply to Ben's point: I was talking about the fact that neuroscientists make these claims about high level cognition; I was not referring to the cases where they try to explain low-level, sensory and motor periphery functions like stretch receptor neurons. So, to clarify: yes, it is perfectly true that the very low level perceptual and motor systems use simple coding techniques. We have known for decades (since Hubel and Weisel) that retinal ganglion cells use simple coding schemes, etc etc. But the issue I was discussing was about the times when neuroscientists make statements about high level concepts and the processing of those concepts. Many decades ago people suggested that perhaps these concepts were represented by single neurons, but that idea was shot down very quickly, and over the years we have found such sophisticated information processing effects occurring in cognition that it is very difficult to see how single neurons (or multiple redundant sets of neurons) could carry out those functions. This idea is so discredited that it is hard to find references on the subject: it has been accepted for so long that it is common knowledge in the cognitive science community. The gung-ho neuroscientists seem blissfully unaware of this fact because they do not know enough cognitive science. I stated a Ben's List challenge a while back that you apparently missed, so here it is again. *You can ONLY learn how a system works by observation, to the extent that its operation is imperfect. Where it is perfect, it represents a solution to the environment in which it operates, and as such, could be built in countless different ways so long as it operates perfectly. Hence, computational delays, etc., are fair game, but observed cognition and behavior are NOT except to the extent that perfect cognition and behavior can be described, whereupon the difference between observed and theoretical contains the information about construction.* ** *A perfect example
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
Ben Goertzel wrote: Richard, My point was that there are essentially no neuroscientists out there who believe that concepts are represented by single neurons. So you are in vehement agreement with the neuroscience community on this point. The idea that concepts may be represented by cell assemblies, or attractors within cell assemblies, are more prevalent. I assume you're familiar with the thinking/writing of for instance Walter Freeman and Susan Greenfield on these issues. You may consider them wrong, but they are not wrong due to obvious errors or due to obliviousness to cog sci data. So let me see if I've got this straight: you are saying that there are essentially no neuroscientists who talk about spiking patterns in single neurons encoding relationships between concepts? Not low-level features, as we discussed before, but medium- to high-level concepts? You are saying that when they talk about the spike trains encoding bayesian contingencies, they NEVER mean, or imply, contingencies between concepts? 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
Vladimir Nesov wrote: On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 8:09 PM, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ben Goertzel wrote: Richard, My point was that there are essentially no neuroscientists out there who believe that concepts are represented by single neurons. So you are in vehement agreement with the neuroscience community on this point. The idea that concepts may be represented by cell assemblies, or attractors within cell assemblies, are more prevalent. I assume you're familiar with the thinking/writing of for instance Walter Freeman and Susan Greenfield on these issues. You may consider them wrong, but they are not wrong due to obvious errors or due to obliviousness to cog sci data. So let me see if I've got this straight: you are saying that there are essentially no neuroscientists who talk about spiking patterns in single neurons encoding relationships between concepts? Not low-level features, as we discussed before, but medium- to high-level concepts? You are saying that when they talk about the spike trains encoding bayesian contingencies, they NEVER mean, or imply, contingencies between concepts? What's a concept in this context, Richard? For example, place cells activate on place fields, pretty palpable correlates, one could say they represent concepts (and it's not a perceptual correlate). There are relations between these concepts, prediction of their activity, encoding of their sequences that plays role in episodic memory, and so on. At the same time, the process by which they are computed is largely unknown, individual cells perform some kind of transformation on other cells, but how much of the concept is encoded in cells themselves rather than in cells they receive input from is also unknown. Since they jump on all kinds of contextual cues, it's likely that their activity to some extent depends on activity in most of the brain, but it doesn't invalidate analysis considering individual cells or small areas of cortex, just as gravitation pull from the Mars doesn't invalidate approximate calculations made on Earth according to Newton's laws. I don't quite see what you are criticizing, apart from specific examples of apparent confusion. No, object-concepts and the like. Not place, motion or action 'concepts'. For example, Quiroga et al showed their subjects pictures of famous places and people, then made assertions about how those things were represented. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
Vladimir Nesov wrote: On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 8:34 PM, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: No, object-concepts and the like. Not place, motion or action 'concepts'. For example, Quiroga et al showed their subjects pictures of famous places and people, then made assertions about how those things were represented. Now that I have a bit better understanding of neuroscience than a year ago, I reread relevant part of your paper and skimmed the Quiroga et al's paper (Invariant visual representation by single neurons in the human brain, for those who don't want to look it up in Richard's paper). I don't see a significant disagreement. They didn't mean to imply obviously wrong assertion that there are only few cells corresponding to each high-level concept (to quote: the fact that we can discover in this short time some images -- such as photographs of Jennifer Aniston -- that drive the cells, suggests that each cell might represent more than one class of images). Sparse and distributed representations are mentioned as extreme perspectives, not a dichtomy. Results certainly have some properties of sparse representation, as opposed to extremely distributed, which doesn't mean that results imply extremely sparse representation. Observed cells as correlates of high-level concepts were surprisingly invariant to the form in which that high-level concept was presented, which does suggest that representation is much more explicit than in the extremely distributed case. Or course, it's not completely explicit. So, at this point I see at least this item in your paper as a strawman objection (given that I didn't revisit other items). Not correct. We covered all the possible interpretations of what they said. All you have done above is to quote back their words, without taking into account the fact that we thought through the implications of what they said, and pointed out that those implications did not make any sense. They want some kind of mixture of sparse and multiply redundant and not distributed. The whole point of what we wrote was that there is no consistent interpretation of what they tried to give as their conclusion. If you think there is, bring it out and put it side by side with what we said. But please, it doesn't help to just repeat back what they said, and declare that Harley and I were wrong. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
Ben Goertzel wrote: I saw the main point of Richard's paper as being that the available neuroscience data drastically underdetermines the nature of neural knowledge representation ... so that drawing conclusions about neural KR from available data involves loads of theoretical presuppositions ... However, my view is that this is well known among neuroscientists, and your reading of the Quiroga et al paper supports this... You have still not answered my previous question about your claim that there are essentially no neuroscientists who say that spiking patterns in single neurons encode relationships between concepts. And yet now you make another assertion about something that you think is well known among neuroscientists, while completely ignoring the actual argument that Harley and I brought to bear on this issue. Richard Loosemore ben g On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 1:33 PM, Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 8:34 PM, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: No, object-concepts and the like. Not place, motion or action 'concepts'. For example, Quiroga et al showed their subjects pictures of famous places and people, then made assertions about how those things were represented. Now that I have a bit better understanding of neuroscience than a year ago, I reread relevant part of your paper and skimmed the Quiroga et al's paper (Invariant visual representation by single neurons in the human brain, for those who don't want to look it up in Richard's paper). I don't see a significant disagreement. They didn't mean to imply obviously wrong assertion that there are only few cells corresponding to each high-level concept (to quote: the fact that we can discover in this short time some images -- such as photographs of Jennifer Aniston -- that drive the cells, suggests that each cell might represent more than one class of images). Sparse and distributed representations are mentioned as extreme perspectives, not a dichtomy. Results certainly have some properties of sparse representation, as opposed to extremely distributed, which doesn't mean that results imply extremely sparse representation. Observed cells as correlates of high-level concepts were surprisingly invariant to the form in which that high-level concept was presented, which does suggest that representation is much more explicit than in the extremely distributed case. Or course, it's not completely explicit. So, at this point I see at least this item in your paper as a strawman objection (given that I didn't revisit other items). -- Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://causalityrelay.wordpress.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=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
Ben Goertzel wrote: On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 4:44 PM, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ben Goertzel wrote: I saw the main point of Richard's paper as being that the available neuroscience data drastically underdetermines the nature of neural knowledge representation ... so that drawing conclusions about neural KR from available data involves loads of theoretical presuppositions ... However, my view is that this is well known among neuroscientists, and your reading of the Quiroga et al paper supports this... You have still not answered my previous question about your claim that there are essentially no neuroscientists who say that spiking patterns in single neurons encode relationships between concepts. I did reply to that email Uh, that is not the case, as far as I can see. Maybe you better check your email stream: I can see no reply to it here. And yet now you make another assertion about something that you think is well known among neuroscientists, while completely ignoring the actual argument that Harley and I brought to bear on this issue. I read that paper a year or two ago, I don't remember the details and don't feel like looking them up right now, sorry... I was admittedly replying based on a semi-dim recollection... My recollection is that you were arguing various neuroscientists were overinterpreting their data, and drawing cognitive conclusions from fMRI and other data that were not really warranted by the data without loads of other theoretical assumptions. Sorry if this was the wrong take-away point, but that's what I remember from it ;-) 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/?; 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=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
Vladimir Nesov wrote: On Sat, Nov 22, 2008 at 12:30 AM, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: They want some kind of mixture of sparse and multiply redundant and not distributed. The whole point of what we wrote was that there is no consistent interpretation of what they tried to give as their conclusion. If you think there is, bring it out and put it side by side with what we said. There is always a consistent interpretation that drops their interpretation altogether and leaves the data. I don't see their interpretation as strongly asserting anything. They are just saying the same thing in a different language you don't like or consider meaningless, but it's a question of definitions and style, not essence, as long as the audience of the paper doesn't get confused. Let me spell it out carefully. If we try to buy their suggestion that the MTL represents concepts (such as Jennifer Aniston) in a sparse manner, then this means that a fraction S of the neurons in MTL encode Jennifer Aniston, and the fraction is small. Now, if the fraction S is small, then the probability of Quiroga et al hitting some neuron inthe set, using a random probe, is also small. Agreed? Clearly, as Quiroga et al point out themselves, if the probability S is very small, we should be surprised if that random probe actually did find a Jennifer Aniston cell. So... To make the argument work, they have to suggest that the number of Jennifer Aniston cells is actually a very significant percentage of the total number of cells. In other words, sparse must mean about one in every hundred cells, or something like that (it's late, and I am tired, so I am not about to do the math, but if Quiroga et al do about a hundred probes and *one* of those is a JA cell, it clearly cannot be one in a million cells). Agreed? But, of that is the case, then each cell must be encoding many concepts, because otherwise there would not be anough cells to encode more than about a hundred concepts, would there? They admit this in the paper: each cell might represent more than one class of images. But there are perhaps hundreds of thousands of different images that a given person can recognize, so in that case, each neuron must be representing (of the order of) thousands of images. The points that Harley and I made were: 1) In what sense is the representation sparse and not distributed if each neuron encodes thousands of images? Roughly one percent of the neurons in the MTL are used for each concept, and each neuron represents thousands of other concepts: this is just as accurate a description of a distributed representation, and it is a long way from anything that resembles a grandmother cell situation. And yet, Quiroga et al give their paper the title Invariant visual representation by single neurons in the human brain. They say SINGLE neurons, when what is implied is that 1% of the entire MTL (or roughly that number) is dedicated to representing a concept like Jennifer Aniston. They seem to want to have their cake and eat it too: they put single neurons in the title, but buried in their logic is the implication that vast numbers of neurons are redundantly coding for each concept. That is an *incoherent* claim. 2) This entire discussion of the contrast between sparse and distributed representations has about it the implication that neurons are a unit that has some functional meaning, when talking about concepts. But Harley and I described an example of a different (mor sophisticated) way to encode concepts, in which it made no sense to talk about these particular neurons as encoding particular concepts. The neurons were just playing the role of dumb constituents in a larger structure, while the actual concepts were (in essence) patterns of activation that were just passing through. This alternate conception of what might be going on leads us to the conclusion that the distinction Quiroga et al make between sparse and distributed is not necessarily meaningful at all. In our alternate conception, the distinction is meaningless, and the conclusion that Quiroga et al draw (that there is an invariant, sparse and explicit code) is not valid - it is only a coherent conclusion if we buy the idea that individual neurons are doing some representing of concepts. In other words, the conclusion was incoherent in this sense also. It was theory laden. The whole mess is summed up quite well by a statement that they make: In the ... case [of distributed representation], recognition would require the simultaneous activation of a large number of cells and therefore we would expect each cell to respond to many pictures with similar basic features. This is in contrast to the sparse firing we observe, because most MTL cells do not respond to the great majority of images seen by the patient. But the only way to make their 'sparse interpretation work would be to have (about) 1
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
Ben Goertzel wrote: I don't think Qiroga et al's statements are contradictory, just irritatingly vague... I agree w Richard that the distributed vs sparse dichotomy is poorly framed and in large part a bogus dichotomy I feel the same way about the symbolic vs subsymbolic dichotomy... Many of the conceptual distinctions at the heart of standard cognitive science theory are very poorly defined, it's disappointing... Well, we agree on that much then. ;-) All I can say is that I am working my way through the entire corpus of knowledge in cog sci, attempting to unify it in such a way that it really does all hang together, and become well defined enough to be both testable and buildable as a complete AGI. The paper I wrote with Harley, and the more recent one on consciousness, were just a couple of opening salvos in that effort. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory
BillK wrote: Nobody has mentioned this yet. http://www.physorg.com/news146319784.html I got a draft version of the paper earlier this year, and after a quick scan I filed it under 'junk'. I just read it through again, and the filing stays the same. His basic premise is that connectionists argued from the very beginning that they wanted to do things in a way that did not involve a central executive. They wanted to see how much could be done by having large numbers of autonomous units do things independently. Turns out, quite a lot can be achieved that way. But it seems that Asim Roy has fundamentally misunderstood the force and the intent of that initial declaration by the connectionists. There was a reason they said what they said: they wanted to get away from the old symbol processing paradigm in which one thing happened at a time and symbols were separated from the mechanisms that modified or used symbols. The connectionists were not being dogmatic about No Controllers!, they just wanted to stop all power being vested in the hands of a central executive ... and their motivation was from cognitive science, not engineering or control theory. Roy seems to be completely obsessed with the idea that they are wrong, while at the same time not really understanding why they said it, and not really having a concrete proposal (or account of empirical data) to substitute for the connectionist ideas. To tell the truth, I don't think there are many connectionists who are so hell-bent on the idea of not having a central controller, that they would not be open to an architecture that did have one (or several). They just don't think it would be good to have central controllers in charge of ALL the heavy lifting. Roy's paper has the additional disadvantage of being utterly filled with underlines and boldface. He shouts. Not good in something that is supposed to be a scientific paper. Sorry, but this is just junk. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
Pei Wang wrote: Derek, I have no doubt that their proposal contains interesting ideas and will produce interesting and valuable results --- most AI projects do, though the results and the values are often not what they targeted (or they claimed to be targeting) initially. Biologically inspired approaches are attractive, partly because they have existing proof for the mechanism to work. However, we need to remember that inspired by a working solution is one thing, and to treat that solution as the best way to achieve a goal is another. Furthermore, the difficult part in these approaches is to separate the aspect of the biological mechanism/process that should be duplicated from the aspects that shouldn't. I share your concerns about this project, although I might have a slightly different set of reasons for being doubtful. I watched part of one of the workshops that Mohdra chaired, on Cognitive Computing, and it gave me the same feeling that neuroscience gatherings always give me: a lot of talk about neural hardware, punctuated by sudden, out-of-the-blue statements about cognitive ideas that seem completely unrelated to the ocean of neural talk that comes before and after. There is a *depresssingly* long history of people doing this - and not just in neuroscience, but in many branches of engineering, in physics, in computer science, etc. There are people out there who know that the mind is the new frontier, and they want to be in the party. They also know that the cognitive scientists (in the broad sense) are probably the folks who are at the center of the party (in the sense of having most comprehensive knowledge). So these people do what they do best, but add in a sprinkling of technical terms and (to be fair) some actual knowledge of some chunks of cognitive science. Problem is, that to a cognitive scientist what they are doing is amateurish. Another, closely related thing that they do is talk about low level issues witout realizing just how disconnected those are from where the real story (probably) lies. Thus, Mohdra emphasizes the importance of spike timing as opposed to average firing rate. He may well be right that the pattern or the timing is more important, but IMO he is doing the equivalent of saying Let's talk about the best way to design an algorithm to control an airport. First problem to solve: should we use Emitter-Coupled Logic in the transistors that are in oour computers that will be running the algorithms. -| 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
, but I and lot of other people can --- including brain surgeons who actually prove the value of their understandings with successful operations that are probably performed many times a day around the world. This has got nothing whatever to do with the question under discussion. ### My prior post P.S. /(With regard to the alleged bottoming out reported in your papert: as I have pointed out in previous threads, even the lowest level nodes in any system would normally have associations that would give them a type and degree of grounding and, thus, further meaning So that spreading activation would normally not bottom out when it reaches the lowest level nodes. But it would be subject to circularly, or a lack of information about lowest nodes other than what could be learned from their associations with other nodes in the system.)/ ### Richard said The spreading activation you are talking about is not the same as the operation of the analysis mechanism. You are talking about things other than the analysis mechanism that I have posited. Hence not relevant. ## My response ## Richard, you above said that “Concepts are judged real by the system to the extent that they play a very strongly anchored and consistent role in the foreground. Color concepts are anchored more strongly than any other, hence they are very real.” This means that you, yourself, consider low level colors inputs to have a type of grounding in the foreground of your molecular framework, which is one aspect of what I was talking about and what you are denying immediately above. The very sense of realness which you claim the system associates with these colors input nodes is part of the total analysis the system makes of them. That colors play a major role in visual sensation, and the nature of the role that they play in that sensation, such as that it appears to fill areas in a roughly 2D perception of the world, are analyzable attributes of them. You are free to define “analysis” narrowly to avoid my argument, but that would serves no purpose other than trying to protect your vanity. Okay, this is where the discussion ends, at the words your vanity. You have no idea that the definition of analysis mechanism I use MUST be defined that narrowly if it is to address the Hard problem. Furthermore, you have now done what you always do at this point in my attempts to respond to your points: you start making comments about me personally. Thus: but that would serves no purpose other than trying to protect your vanity. I now regret wasting so much time attempting to respond to what seemed to be a politely worded set of questions about the paper. I noticed your post because Ben quoted it, and I noticed that it was not abusive. So I made the mistake of engaging you again. In all of the above discussion I find myself trying to explain that you must not confuse the hard problem and the non-hard problems of consciousness, because the non-hard problems have nothing whatever to do with the argument. I have now done this - what? - a dozen times at least. I have been doing this from the beginning, but instead of listening to my repeated attempts to get you to understand the distinction, you only repeat the same mistake over and over again. This is what I get for trying to engage in debate with someone who picks up a technical distinction (e.g. Hard/Non-Hard problem of consciousness) from Wikipedia, and then, a couple of days later, misapplies the concept left right and center. Sorry: I did make one last effort, but there is a limit to how many times I can say the same thing and be ignored every time. Richard Loosemore If one is talking about the sense of experience and mental associations a normal human mind associates with the color red, one is talking about a complex of activations that involve much more than just the activation of a single or even a contiguous group of lowest level color sensing nodes. For example, the system has to have a higher level concept to let it know that a given color red in one part of the visual field is the same as the same color red in another part of the visual field. This is a higher level concept that is vital to any analysis of the meaning of the activation of a lowest level red receptor node. So what you are rejecting as irrelevant are not only clearly relevant to your own argument, but they are relevant to any honest attempt to understand the subjective experience of the activation of the types of lower level nodes your paper places such an emphasis on. Ed Porter = P.S. I have gotten sufficiently busy that I should not have taken the time to write this response, but because of the thoughtfulness of your below email, I felt obligated to respond. Unfortunately if you
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
Steve Richfield wrote: Richard, Broad agreement, with one comment from the end of your posting... On 11/20/08, *Richard Loosemore* [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Another, closely related thing that they do is talk about low level issues witout realizing just how disconnected those are from where the real story (probably) lies. Thus, Mohdra emphasizes the importance of spike timing as opposed to average firing rate. There are plenty of experiments that show that consecutive closely-spaced pulses result when something goes off scale, probably the equivalent to computing Bayesian probabilities 100%, somewhat akin to the overflow light on early analog computers. These closely-spaced pulses have a MUCH larger post-synaptic effect than the same number of regularly spaced pulses. However, as far as I know, this only occurs during anomalous situations - maybe when something really new happens, that might trigger learning? IMHO, it is simply not possible to play this game without having a close friend with years of experience poking mammalian neurons. This stuff is simply NOT in the literature. He may well be right that the pattern or the timing is more important, but IMO he is doing the equivalent of saying Let's talk about the best way to design an algorithm to control an airport. First problem to solve: should we use Emitter-Coupled Logic in the transistors that are in oour computers that will be running the algorithms. Still, even with my above comments, you conclusion is still correct. The main problem is that if you interpret spike timing to be playing the role that you (and they) imply above, then you are commiting yourself to a whole raft of assumptions about how knowledge is generally represented and processed. However, there are *huge* problems with that set of implicit assumptions not to put too fine a point on it, those implicit assumptions are equivalent to the worst, most backward kind of cognitive theory imaginable. A theory that is 30 or 40 years out of date. The gung-ho neuroscientists seem blissfully unaware of this fact because they do not know enough cognitive science. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
Ben Goertzel wrote: Richard, The main problem is that if you interpret spike timing to be playing the role that you (and they) imply above, then you are commiting yourself to a whole raft of assumptions about how knowledge is generally represented and processed. However, there are *huge* problems with that set of implicit assumptions not to put too fine a point on it, those implicit assumptions are equivalent to the worst, most backward kind of cognitive theory imaginable. A theory that is 30 or 40 years out of date. The gung-ho neuroscientists seem blissfully unaware of this fact because they do not know enough cognitive science. Richard Loosemore I don't think this is the reason. There are plenty of neuroscientists out there who know plenty of cognitive science. I think many neuroscientists just hold different theoretical presuppositions than you, for reasons other than ignorance of cog sci data. Interdisciplinary cog sci has been around a long time now as you know ... it's not as though cognitive neuroscientists are unaware of its data and ideas... I disagree. Trevor Harley wrote one very influential paper on the subject, and he and I wrote a second paper in which we took a random sampling of neuroscience papers and analyzed them carefully. We found it trivially easy to gather data to illustrate our point. And, no, even though I used my own framework as a point of reference, this was not crucial to the argument, merely a way of bringing the argument into sharp focus. So I am basing my conclusion on gathering actual evidence and publishing a paper about it. Since such luminaries as Jerry Fodor have said much the same thing, I think I stand in fairly solid company. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
Vladimir Nesov wrote: On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 1:40 AM, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The main problem is that if you interpret spike timing to be playing the role that you (and they) imply above, then you are commiting yourself to a whole raft of assumptions about how knowledge is generally represented and processed. However, there are *huge* problems with that set of implicit assumptions not to put too fine a point on it, those implicit assumptions are equivalent to the worst, most backward kind of cognitive theory imaginable. A theory that is 30 or 40 years out of date. Could you give some references to be specific in what you mean? Examples of what you consider outdated cognitive theory and better cognitive theory. Well, you could start with the question of what the neurons are supposed to represent, if the spikes are coding (e.g.) bayesian contingencies. Are the neurons the same as concepts/symbols? Are groups of neurons redundantly coding for concepts/symbols? One or other of these possibilties is usually assumed by default, but this leads to glaring inconsistencies in the interpretation of neuroscience data, as well as begging all of the old questions about how grandmother cells are supposed to do their job. As I said above, cognitive scientists already came to the conclusion, 30 or 40 years ago, that it made no sense to stick to a simple identification of one neuron per concept. And yet many neuroscientists are *implictly* resurrecting this broken idea, without addressing the faults that were previously found in it. (In case you are not familiar with the faults, they include the vulnerability of neurons, the lack of connectivity between arbitrary neurons, the problem of assigning neurons to concepts, the encoding of variables, relationships and negative facts .. ). For example, in Loosemore Harley (in press) you can find an analysis of a paper by Quiroga, Reddy, Kreiman, Koch, and Fried (2005) in which the latter try to claim they have evidence in favor of grandmother neurons (or sparse collections of grandmother neurons) and against the idea of distributed representations. We showed their conclusion to be incoherent. It was deeply implausible, given the empirical data they reported. Furthermore, we used my molecular framework (the same one that was outlined in the consciousness paper) to see how that would explain the same data. It turns out that this much more sophisticated model was very consistent with the data (indeed, it is the only one I know of that can explain the results they got). You can find our paper at www.susaro.com/publications. Richard Loosemore Loosemore, R.P.W. Harley, T.A. (in press). Brains and Minds: On the Usefulness of Localisation Data to Cognitive Psychology. In M. Bunzl S.J. Hanson (Eds.), Foundations of Functional Neuroimaging. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Quiroga, R. Q., Reddy, L., Kreiman, G., Koch, C. Fried, I. (2005). Invariant visual representation by single-neurons in the human brain. Nature, 435, 1102-1107. --- 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=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
Trent Waddington wrote: On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 11:02 AM, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Since such luminaries as Jerry Fodor have said much the same thing, I think I stand in fairly solid company. Wow, you said Fodor without being critical of his work. Is that legal? Trent Arrrggghhh... you noticed! :-( I was hoping nobody would catch me out on that one. Okay, so Fodor and I disagree about everything else. But that's not the point :-). He's a Heavy, so if he is on my side on this one issue, its okay to quote him. (That's my story and I'm sticking to it.) 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
. Theory as Metaphor This pattern of theorizing—first a candidate mechanism, then a rival mechanism that is noticeably different, then some experiments to tell us which is better—is the bread and butter of cognitive science. However, it is one thing to decide between two candidate mechanisms that are sketched in the vaguest of terms (with just enough specificity to allow the two candidates to be distinguished), and making a categorical statement about the precise nature of the mechanism. To be blunt, very few cognitive psychologists would intend the idea of packages drifting through a system and encountering places where there is only room for one, to be taken that literally. On a scale from “metaphor” at one end to “mechanism blueprint” at the other, the idea of a bottleneck is surely nearer to the metaphor end. How many cognitive theorists would say that they are trying to pin down the mechanisms of cognition so precisely that every one of the subsidiary assumptions involved in a theory are supposed to be taken exactly as they come? In the case of the bottleneck theory, for instance, the task packages look suspiciously like symbols being processed by a symbol system, in old-fashioned symbolic-cognition style: but does that mean that connectionist implementations are being explicitly ruled out by the theory? Does the theory buy into all of the explicit representation issues involved in symbol processing, where the semantics of a task package is entirely contained within the package itself, rather than distributed in the surrounding machinery? These and many other questions are begged by the idea of task packages moving around a system and encountering a bottleneck, but would theorists who align themselves with the bottleneck theory want to say that all of these other aspects must be taken literally? We think not. In fact, it seems more reasonable to suppose that the present state of cognitive psychology involves the search for metaphor-like ideas that are described as if they were true mechanisms, but which should not be taken literally by anyone, and especially not by anyone with a brain imaging device who wants to locate those mechanisms in the brain. ENDQUOTE- Richard Loosemore On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 4:35 AM, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Vladimir Nesov wrote: Could you give some references to be specific in what you mean? Examples of what you consider outdated cognitive theory and better cognitive theory. Well, you could start with the question of what the neurons are supposed to represent, if the spikes are coding (e.g.) bayesian contingencies. Are the neurons the same as concepts/symbols? Are groups of neurons redundantly coding for concepts/symbols? One or other of these possibilties is usually assumed by default, but this leads to glaring inconsistencies in the interpretation of neuroscience data, as well as begging all of the old questions about how grandmother cells are supposed to do their job. As I said above, cognitive scientists already came to the conclusion, 30 or 40 years ago, that it made no sense to stick to a simple identification of one neuron per concept. And yet many neuroscientists are *implictly* resurrecting this broken idea, without addressing the faults that were previously found in it. (In case you are not familiar with the faults, they include the vulnerability of neurons, the lack of connectivity between arbitrary neurons, the problem of assigning neurons to concepts, the encoding of variables, relationships and negative facts .. ). For example, in Loosemore Harley (in press) you can find an analysis of a paper by Quiroga, Reddy, Kreiman, Koch, and Fried (2005) in which the latter try to claim they have evidence in favor of grandmother neurons (or sparse collections of grandmother neurons) and against the idea of distributed representations. We showed their conclusion to be incoherent. It was deeply implausible, given the empirical data they reported. Furthermore, we used my molecular framework (the same one that was outlined in the consciousness paper) to see how that would explain the same data. It turns out that this much more sophisticated model was very consistent with the data (indeed, it is the only one I know of that can explain the results they got). You can find our paper at www.susaro.com/publications. Richard Loosemore Loosemore, R.P.W. Harley, T.A. (in press). Brains and Minds: On the Usefulness of Localisation Data to Cognitive Psychology. In M. Bunzl S.J. Hanson (Eds.), Foundations of Functional Neuroimaging. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Quiroga, R. Q., Reddy, L., Kreiman, G., Koch, C. Fried, I. (2005). Invariant visual representation by single-neurons in the human brain. Nature, 435, 1102-1107. --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
Ben Goertzel wrote: The neuron = concept 'theory' is extremely broken: it is so broken, that when neuroscientists talk about bayesian contingencies being calculated or encoded by spike timing mechanisms, that claim is incoherent. This is not always true ... in some cases there are solidly demonstrated connections between neurally computed bayesian contingencies and observed perceptual and motor phenomena in organisms... I agree that no one knows how abstract concepts are represented in the brain, but for sensorimotor stuff it is not the case that work on bayesian population coding in the brain is incoherent No contest: it is valid there. But I am only referring to the cases where neuroscientists imply that what they are talking about are higher level concepts. This happens extremely frequently. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
that in that case the explanation is a failure of the analysis mechanism because it bottoms out. However, just because I picked that example for the sake of clarity, that does not mean that the *only* place where the analysis mechanism can get into trouble must be just when it bumps into those peripheral atoms. I tried to explain this in a previous reply to someone (perhaps it was you): it would be entirely possible that higher level atoms could get built to represent [a sum of all the qualia-atoms that are part of one object], and if that happened we might find that this higher level atom was partly analyzable (it is composed of lower level qualia) and partly not (any analysis hits the brick wall after one successful unpacking step). So when you raise the example of being conscious of your son, it can be partly a matter of the consciousness that comes from just consciousness of his parts. But there are other things that could be at work in this case, too. How much is that consciousness of a whole object an awareness of an internal visual image? How much is it due to the fact that we can represent the concept of [myself having a concept of object x] in which case the unanalyzability is deriving not from the large object, but from the fact that [self having a concept of...] is a representation of something your *self* is doing and we know already that that is a bottoming-out concept. Overall, you can see that there are multiple ways to get the analysis mechanism to bottom out, and it may be able to bottom out partially rather than completely. Just because I used a prticular example of bottoming-out does not mean that I claimed this was the only way it could happen. And, of course, all those other claims of conscious experiences are widely agreed to be more dilute (less mysterious) than such things as qualia. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
at simply re-stating your position that you do not think the theory succeeds in explaining the subject, whereas I cannot bring you round to talking about what is the most important idea in the paper: that such simple statements as the ones you are making are just using a concept of explanation without examining it. So we still have not addressed the content of part 2 of the paper. I did try to say all of the above in the last post, but you didn't mention that bit in your reply ;-) 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
Ben Goertzel wrote: Richard, So are you saying that: According to the ordinary scientific standards of 'explanation', the subjective experience of consciousness cannot be explained ... and as a consequence, the relationship between subjective consciousness and physical data (as required to be elucidated by any solution to Chalmers' hard problem as normally conceived) also cannot be explained. If so, then: according to the ordinary scientific standards of explanation, you are not explaining consciousness, nor explaining the relation btw consciousness and the physical ... but are rather **explaining why, due to the particular nature of consciousness and its relationship to the ordinary scientific standards of explanation, this kind of explanation is not possible** ?? No! If you write the above, then you are summarizing the question that I pose at the half-way point of the paper, just before the second part gets underway. The ordinary scientific standards of explanation are undermined by questions about consciousness. They break. You cannot use them. They become internally inconsistent. You cannot say I hereby apply the standard mechanism of 'explanation' to Problem X, but then admit that Problem X IS the very mechanism that is responsible for determining the 'explanation' method you are using, AND the one thing you know about that mechanism is that you can see a gaping hole in the mechanism! You have to find a way to mend that broken standard of explanation. I do that in part 2. So far we have not discussed the whole paper, only part 1. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
of your paper. In multiple prior posts on this thread I have said I believe the real source of consciousness appears to lie in such a molecular framework, but that to have anything approaching a human level of such consciousness this framework, and its computations that give rise to consciousness, have to be extremely complex. I have also emphasized that brain scientist who have already done research on the neural correlates of consciousness, tend to indicate humans usually only report consciousness of things associated with fairly broad spread neural activation, which would normally involve many billions or trillions of inter-neuron messages per second. The data produced by neuroscience, at this point, is extremely confusing. It is also obscured by people who are themselves confused about the distinction between the Hard and Easy problems. I do not believe you can deduce anything meaningful from the neural research yet. See Loosemore and Harley (forthcoming). I have posited that widespread activation of the nodes directly and indirectly associated with a given “conscious” node, provides dynamic grounding for the meaning of the conscious node. As I have pointed out, we know of nothing about physical reality that is anything other than computation (if you consider representation to be part of computation). Similarly there is nothing our subjective experience can tell us about our own consciousnesses that is other than computation. One of the key words we humans use to describe our consciousnesses is “awareness.” Awareness is created by computation. It is my belief that this awareness comes from the complex, dynamically focused, and meaningful way in which our thought processes compute in interaction with themselves. Ed Porter P.S. /(With regard to the alleged bottoming out reported in your papert: as I have pointed out in previous threads, even the lowest level nodes in any system would normally have associations that would give them a type and degree of grounding and, thus, further meaning So that spreading activation would normally not bottom out when it reaches the lowest level nodes. But it would be subject to circularly, or a lack of information about lowest nodes other than what could be learned from their associations with other nodes in the system.)/ The spreading activation you are talking about is not the same as the operation of the analysis mechanism. You are talking about things other than the analysis mechanism that I have posited. Hence not relevant. Regards Richard Loosemore -Original Message- From: Richard Loosemore [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2008 1:57 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness Ben Goertzel wrote: Richard, I re-read your paper and I'm afraid I really don't grok why you think it solves Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness... It really seems to me like what you're suggesting is a cognitive correlate of consciousness, to morph the common phrase neural correlate of consciousness ... You seem to be stating that when X is an unanalyzable, pure atomic sensation from the perspective of cognitive system C, then C will perceive X as a raw quale ... unanalyzable and not explicable by ordinary methods of explication, yet, still subjectively real... But, I don't see how the hypothesis Conscious experience is **identified with** unanalyzable mind-atoms could be distinguished empirically from Conscious experience is **correlated with** unanalyzable mind-atoms I think finding cognitive correlates of consciousness is interesting, but I don't think it constitutes solving the hard problem in Chalmers' sense... I grok that you're saying consciousness feels inexplicable because it has to do with atoms that the system can't explain, due to their role as its primitive atoms ... and this is a good idea, but, I don't see how it bridges the gap btw subjective experience and empirical data .. What it does is explain why, even if there *were* no hard problem, cognitive systems might feel like there is one, in regard to their unanalyzable atoms Another worry I have is: I feel like I can be conscious of my son, even though he is not an unanalyzable atom. I feel like I can be conscious of the unique impression he makes ... in the same way that I'm conscious of redness ... and, yeah, I feel like I can't fully explain the conscious impression he makes on me, even though I can explain a lot of things about him... So I'm not convinced that atomic sensor input is the only source of raw, unanalyzable consciousness... My first response to this is that you still don't seem to have taken account of what was said in the second part
Re: [agi] Now hear this: Human qualia are generated in the human cranial CNS and no place else
Colin Hales wrote: Mike Tintner wrote: Colin:Qualia generation has been highly localised into specific regions in *cranial *brain material already. Qualia are not in the periphery. Qualia are not in the spinal CNS, Qualia are not in the cranial periphery eg eyes or lips Colin, This is to a great extent nonsense. Which sensation/emotion - (qualia is a word strictly for philosophers not scientists, I suggest) - is not located in the body? When you are angry, you never frown or bite or tense your lips? The brain helps to generate the emotion - (and note helps). But emotions are bodily events - and *felt* bodily. This whole discussion ignores the primary paradox about consciousness, (which is first and foremost sentience) : *the brain doesn't feel a thing* - sentience/feeling is located in the body outside the brain. When a surgeon cuts your brain, you feel nothing. You feel and are conscious of your emotions in and with your whole body. I am talking about the known, real actual origins of *all* phenomenal fields. This is anatomical/physiological fact for 150 years. You don't see with your eyes. You don't feel with your skin. Vision is in the occipital cortex. The eyes provide data. Skin provides the data, CNS somatosensory field delivers the experience of touch and projects it to the skin region. ALL perceptions, BAR NONE, including all emotions, imagination, everything - ALL of it is actually generated in cranial CNS. Perceptual fields are projected from the CNS to appear AS-IF they originate in the periphery. The sensory measurements themselves convey no sensations at all. I could give you libraries of data. Ask all doctors. They specifically call NOCICEPTION the peripheral sensor and PAIN the CNS (basal...inferior colliculus or was it cingulate...can't remember exactly) percept. Pain in your back? NOPE. Pain is in the CNS and projected (Badly) to the location of your back, like a periscope-view. Pain in your gut? NOPE. You have nociceptors in the myenetric/submucosal plexuses that convey data to the CNS which generates PAIN and projects it at the gut. Feel sad? Your laterally offset amygdala create an omnidirectional percept centered on your medial cranium region. etc etc etc etc YESBrains don't have their own sensors or self-represent with a perceptual field. So what? That's got nothing whatever to do with the matter at hand. CUT cortex and you can kill off what it is like percepts out there in the body (although in confusing ways). Touch appropriate exposed cortex with a non-invasive probe and you can create percepts apparently, but not actually, elsewhere in the body. The entire neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) paradigm is dedicated to exploring CNS neurons for correlates of qualia. NOT peripheral neurons. Nobody anywhere else in the world thinks that sensation is generated in the periphery. The *CNS* paints your world with qualia-paint in a projected picture constructed in the CNS using sensationless data from the periphery. Please internalise this brute fact. I didn't invent it or simply choose to believe it because it was convenient. I read the literature. It told me. It's there to be learned. Lots of people have been doing conclusive, real physiology for a very long time. Be empirically informed: Believe them. Or, if you are still convinced it's nonsense then tell them, not me. They'd love to hear your evidence and you'll get a nobel prize for an amazing about-turn in medical knowledge. :-) This has been known, apparently perhaps by everybody but computer scientists, for 150 years.Can I consider this a general broadcast once and for all? I don't ever want to have to pump this out again. Life is too short. Yes, although it might be more accurate to say that this is the last known place where you can catch the sensory percepts as single, identifiable things I don't think it would really be fair to say that this place is the origin of them. So, for example: - If you cover a sheet of red paper you happen to be looking at, the red qualia disappear. - If instead you knock out the cones that pick up red light in the eye, then the red qualia disappear. - If you take out the ganglion cells attached to the red cones in the retina, the red qualia disappear. - If you keep doing this at any point between there and area 17 (the visual cortex), you can get the red qualia to disappear. But after that, there is no single place you can cut off the percept with one single piece of intervention. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] My prospective plan to neutralize AGI and other dangerous technologies...
Steve Richfield wrote: To all, I am considering putting up a web site to filter the crazies as follows, and would appreciate all comments, suggestions, etc. Everyone visiting the site would get different questions, in different orders, etc. Many questions would have more than one correct answer, and in many cases, some combinations of otherwise reasonable individual answers would fail. There would be optional tutorials for people who are not confident with the material. After successfully navigating the site, an applicant would submit their picture and signature, and we would then provide a license number. The applicant could then provide their name and number to 3rd parties to verify that the applicant is at least capable of rational thought. This information would look much like a driver's license, and could be printed out as needed by anyone who possessed a correct name and number. The site would ask a variety of logical questions, most especially probing into: 1. Their understanding of Reverse Reductio ad Absurdum methods of resolving otherwise intractable disputes. 2. Whether they belong to or believe in any religion that supports various violent acts (with quotes from various religious texts). This would exclude pretty much every religion, as nearly all religions condone useless violence of various sorts, or the toleration or exposure of violence toward others. Even Buddhists resist MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) while being unable to propose any potentially workable alternative to nuclear war. Jesus attacked the money changers with no hope of benefit for anyone. Mohammad killed the Jewish men of Medina and sold their women and children into slavery, etc., etc. 3. A statement in their own words that they hereby disavow allegiance to any non-human god or alien entity, and that they will NOT follow the directives of any government led by people who would obviously fail this test. This statement would be included on the license. This should force many people off of the fence, as they would have to choose between sanity and Heaven (or Hell). Then, Ben, the CIA, diplomats, etc., could verify that they are dealing with people who don't have any of the common forms of societal insanity. Perhaps the site should be multi-lingual? Any and all thoughts are GREATLY appreciated. Thanks Steve Richfield I see how this would work: crazy people never tell lies, so you'd be able to nail 'em when they gave the wrong answers. 8-| 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
Harry Chesley wrote: Richard Loosemore wrote: Harry Chesley wrote: Richard Loosemore wrote: I completed the first draft of a technical paper on consciousness the other day. It is intended for the AGI-09 conference, and it can be found at: http://susaro.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/draft_consciousness_rpwl.pdf One other point: Although this is a possible explanation for our subjective experience of qualia like red or soft, I don't see it explaining pain or happy quite so easily. You can hypothesize a sort of mechanism-level explanation of those by relegating them to the older or lower parts of the brain (i.e., they're atomic at the conscious level, but have more effects at the physiological level (like releasing chemicals into the system)), but that doesn't satisfactorily cover the subjective side for me. I do have a quick answer to that one. Remember that the core of the model is the *scope* of the analysis mechanism. If there is a sharp boundary (as well there might be), then this defines the point where the qualia kick in. Pain receptors are fairly easy: they are primitive signal lines. Emotions are, I believe, caused by clusters of lower brain structures, so the interface between lower brain and foreground is the place where the foreground sees a limit to the analysis mechanisms. More generally, the significance of the foreground is that it sets a boundary on how far the analysis mechanisms can reach. I am not sure why that would seem less satisfactory as an explanation of the subjectivity. It is a raw feel, and that is the key idea, no? My problem is if qualia are atomic, with no differentiable details, why do some feel different than others -- shouldn't they all be separate but equal? Red is relatively neutral, while searing hot is not. Part of that is certainly lower brain function, below the level of consciousness, but that doesn't explain to me why it feels qualitatively different. If it was just something like increased activity (franticness) in response to searing hot, then fine, that could just be something like adrenaline being pumped into the system, but there is a subjective feeling that goes beyond that. There is more than one question wrapped up inside this question, I think. First: all qualia feel different, of course. You seem to be pointing to a sense in which pain is more different than most ? But is that really a valid idea? Does pain have differentiable details? Well, there are different types of pain but that is to be expected, like different colors. But that is arelatively trivial point. Within one single pain there can be several *effects* of that pain, including some strange ones that do not have counterparts in the vision-color case. For example, suppose that a searing hot pain caused a simultaneous triggering of the motivational system, forcing you to suddenly want to do something (like pulling your body part away from the pain). The feeling of wanting (wanting to pull away) is a quale of its own, in a sense, so it would not be impossible for one quale (searing hot) to always be associated with another (wanting to pull away). If those always occurred together, it might seem that there was structure to the pain experience, where in fact there is a pair of things happening. It is probably more than a pair of things, but perhaps you get my drift. Remember that having associations to a pain is not part of what we consider to be the essence of the subjective experience; the bit that is most mysterious and needs to be explained. Another thing we have to keep in mind here is that the exact details of how each subjective experience feels are certainly going to seem different, and some can seem like each other and not like others colors are like other colors, but not like pains. That is to be expected: we can say that colors happen in a certain place in our sensorium (vision) while pains are associated with the body (usually), but these differences are not inconsistent with the account I have given. If concept-atoms encoding [red] always attach to all the othe concept-atoms involving visual experiences, that would make them very different than pains like [searing hot], but all of this could be true at the same time that [red] would do what it does to the analysis mechanism (when we try to think the thought Was is the essence of redness?). So the problem with the analysis mechanism would happen with both pains and colors, even though the two different atom types played games with different sets of other concept-atoms. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
John G. Rose wrote: From: Richard Loosemore [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Three things. First, David Chalmers is considered one of the world's foremost researchers in the consciousness field (he is certainly now the most celebrated). He has read the argument presented in my paper, and he has discussed it with me. He understood all of it, and he does not share any of your concerns, nor anything remotely like your concerns. He had one single reservation, on a technical point, but when I explained my answer, he thought it interesting and novel, and possibly quite valid. Second, the remainder of your comments below are not coherent enough to be answerable, and it is not my job to walk you through the basics of this field. Third, about your digression: gravity does not escape from black holes, because gravity is just the curvature of spacetime. The other things that cannot escape from black holes are not forces. I will not be replying to any further messages from you because you are wasting my time. I read this paper several times and still have trouble holding the model that you describe in my head as it fades quickly and then there is a just a memory of it (recursive ADD?). I'm not up on the latest consciousness research but still somewhat understand what is going on there. Your paper is a nice and terse description but to get others to understand the highlighted entity that you are trying to describe may be easier done with more diagrams. When I kind of got it for a second it did appear quantitative, like mathematically describable. I find it hard to believe though that others have not put it this way, I mean doesn't Hofstadter talk about this in his books, in an unacademical fashion? Hofstadter does talk about loopiness and recursion in ways that are similar, but the central idea is not the same. FWIW I did have a brief discussion with him about this at the same conference where I talked to Chalmers, and he agreed that his latest ideas about consciousness and the one I was suggesting did not seem to overlap. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
Ben Goertzel wrote: Sorry to be negative, but no, my proposal is not in any way a modernization of Peirce's metaphysical analysis of awareness. Could you elaborate the difference? It seems very similar to me. You're saying that consciousness has to do with the bottoming-out of mental hierarchies in raw percepts that are unanalyzable by the mind ... and Peirce's Firsts are precisely raw percepts that are unanalyzable by the mind... It is partly the stance (I arrive at my position from a cognitivist point of view, with specific mechanisms that must be causing the problem), where Peirce appears to suggest the Firsts idea as a purely metaphysical proposal. So, what I am saying is that this superficial resemblance between his position and mine is so superficial that it makes no sense to describe on the latter as a modernization of the former. A good analogy would be Galilean Relativity and Einsten's Relativity. Although there is a superficial resemblance, nobody would really say that Einstein was just a modernization of Galileo. *** The standard meaning of Hard Problem issues was described very well by Chalmers, and I am addressing the hard problem of concsciousness, not the other problems. *** Hmmm I don't really understand why you think your argument is a solution to the hard problem It seems like you explicitly acknowledge in your paper that it's *not*, actually It's more like a philosophical argument as to why the hard problem is unsolvable, IMO. No, that is only part one of the paper, and as you pointed out before, the first part of the proposal ends with a question, not a statement that this was a failure to explain the problem. That question was important. The important part is the analysis of explanation and meaning. This can also be taken to be about your use of the word unsolvable in the above sentence. What I am claiming (and I will make this explicit in a revision of the paper) is that these notions of explanation, meaning, solution to the problem, etc., are pushed to their breaking point by the problem of consciousness. So it is not that there is a problem with understanding consciousness itself, so much as there is a problem with what it means to *explain* things. Other things are easy to explain, but when we ask for an explanation of something like consciousness, the actual notion of explanation breaks down in a drastic way. This is very closely related to the idea of an objective observer in physics in the quantum realm that notion breaks down. What I gave in my paper was (a) a detailed description of how the confusion about consciousness arises [peculiar behavior of the analysis mechanism], but then (b) I went on to point out this peculiar behavior infects much more than just our ability to explain consciousness, because it casts doubt on the fundamental meaning of explanation and semantics and ontology. The conclusion that I then tried to draw was that it would be wrong to say that consciousness was just an artifact or (ordinarily) inexplicable thing, because this would be to tacitly assume that the sense of explain that we are using in these statements is the same one we have always used. Anyone who continued to use explain and mean (etc.) in their old context would be stuck in what I have called Level 0, and in that level the old meanings [sic] of those terms are just not able to address the issue of consciousness. Go back to the quantum mechanics analogy again: it is not right to cling to old ideas of position and momentum, etc., and say that we simply do not know the position of an electron. The real truth - the new truth about how we should understand position and momentum - is that the position of the electron is fundamentally not even determined (without observation). This analogy is not just an analogy, as I think you might begin to guess: there is a deep relationship between these two domains, and I am still working on a way to link them. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Zombies, Autism and Consciousness {WAS Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness]
Trent Waddington wrote: Richard, After reading your paper and contemplating the implications, I believe you have done a good job at describing the intuitive notion of consciousness that many lay-people use the word to refer to. I don't think your explanation is fleshed out enough for those lay-people, but its certainly sufficient for most the people on this list. I would recommend that anyone who hasn't read the paper, and has an interest in this whole consciousness business, give it a read. I especially liked the bit where you describe how the model of self can't be defined in terms of anything else.. as it is inherently recursive. I wonder whether the dynamic updating of the model of self may well be exactly the subjective experience of consciousness that people describe. If so, the notion of a p-zombie is not impossible, as you suggest in your conclusions, but simply an AGI without a self-model. This is something that does intrigue me (the different kinds of self-model that could be in there), but I come to slightly different conclusions. I think someone (Putnam, IIRC) pointed out that you could still have consciousness without the equivalent of any references to self and others, because such a creature would still be experiencing qualia. But, that aside, do you not think that a creature with absolutely no self model at all woudl have some troubles? It woudl not be able to represent itself in the context of the world, so it would be purely reactive. But wait: come to think of it, could it actually control any limbs if it did not have some kind of model of itself? Now, suppose you grant me that all AGIs would have at least some model of self (if only to control a single robot arm): then, if the rest of the cognitive mechanism allows it to think in a powerful and recursive way about the contents of its own thought processes (which I have suggested is one of the main preconditions for being conscious, or even being AG-Intelligent), would it not be difficult to stop it from developing a more general model of itself than just the simple self model needed to control the robot arm? We might find that any kind of self model would be a slippery slope toward a bigger self model. Finally, consider the case of humans with severe Autism. One suggestion is that they have a very poorly developed, or suppressed self model. I would be *extremely* reluctant to think that these humans are p-zombies, just because of that. I know that is a gut feeling, but even so. Finally, the introduction says: Given the strength of feeling on these matters - for example, the widespread belief that AGIs would be dangerous because, as conscious beings, they would inevitably rebel against their lack of freedom - it is incumbent upon the AGI community to resolve these questions as soon as possible. I was really looking forward to seeing you address this widespread belief, but unfortunately you declined. Seems a bit of a tease. Trent Oh, I apologize. :-( I started out with the intention of squeezing into the paper a description of the concsiousness proposal PLUS my parallel proposal about AGI motivation and emotion. It became obvious toward the end that I would not be able to say anything about the latter (I barely had enough room for a terse description of the former). But then I explained instead that this was part of a larger research program to cover issues of motivation, emotion and friendliness. I guess that wording did not really make up for the initial tease, so I'll try to rephrase that in the edited version And I will also try to get the motivation and friendliness paper written asap, to complement this one. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
Benjamin Johnston wrote: I completed the first draft of a technical paper on consciousness the other day. It is intended for the AGI-09 conference, and it can be found at: Hi Richard, I don't have any comments yet about what you have written, because I'm not sure I fully understand what you're trying to say... I hope your answers to these questions will help clarify things. It seems to me that your core argument goes something like this: That there are many concepts for which an introspective analysis can only return the concept itself. That this recursion blocks any possible explanation. That consciousness is one of these concepts because self is inherently recursive. Therefore, consciousness is explicitly blocked from having any kind of explanation. Is this correct? If not, how have I misinterpreted you? This is pretty much accurate, but only up to the end of the first phase of the paper, where I asked the question: Is explaining why we cannot explain something the same as explaining it? The next phase is crucial, because (as I explained a little more in my parallel reply to Ben) the conclusion of part 1 is really that the whole notion of 'explanation' is stretched to breaking point by the concept of consciousness. So in the end what I do is argue that the whole concept of explanation (and meaning, etc) has to be replaced in order to deal with consciousness. Eventually I come to a rather strange-looking conclusion, which is that we are obliged to say that consciousness is a real thing like any other in the universe, but the exact content of it (the subjective core) is truly inexplicable. I have a thought experiment that might help me understand your ideas: If we have a robot designed according to your molecular model, and we then ask the robot what exactly is the nature of red or what is it like to experience the subjective essense of red, the robot may analyze this concept, ultimately bottoming out on an incoming signal line. But what if this robot is intelligent and can study other robots? It might then examine other robots and see that when their analysis bottoms out on an incoming signal line, what actually happens is that the incoming signal line is activated by electromagnetic energy of a certain frequency, and that the object recognition routines identify patterns in signal lines and that when an object is identified it gets annotated with texture and color information from its sensations, and that a particular software module injects all that information into the foreground memory. It might conclude that the experience of experiencing red in the other robot is to have sensors inject atoms into foreground memory, and it could then explain how the current context of that robot's foreground memory interacts with the changing sensations (that have been injected into foreground memory) to make that experience 'meaningful' to the robot. What if this robot then turns its inspection abilities onto itself? Can it therefore further analyze red? How does your theory interpret that situation? -Ben Ahh, but that *is* the way that my theory analyzes the situation, no? :-) What I mean is, I would use a human (me) in place of the first robot. Bear in mind that we must first separate out the hard problem (the pure subjective experience of red) from any easy problems (mere radiation sensititivity, etc). From the point of view of that first robot, what will she get from studying the second robot (other robots in general), if the question she really wants to answer is What is the explanation for *my* subjective experience of redness? She could talk all about the foreground and the way the analysis mechanism works in other robots (and humans), but the question is, what would that avail her is she wanted to answer the hard problem of where her subjective conscious experience comes from? After reading the first part of my paper, she would say (I hope!): Ah, now I see how all my questions about the subjective experience of things are actually caused by my analysis mechanism doing somethig weird. But the (again, I hope) she would say: H, does it meta-explain my subjective experiences if I know why I cannot explain these experiences? And thence to part two of the paper 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
Colin Hales wrote: Dear Richard, I have an issue with the 'falsifiable predictions' being used as evidence of your theory. The problem is that right or wrong...I have a working physical model for consciousness. Predictions 1-3 are something that my hardware can do easily. In fact that kind of experimentation is in my downstream implementation plan. These predictions have nothing whatsoever to do with your theory or mine or anyones. I'm not sure about prediction 4. It's not something I have thought about, so I'll leave it aside for now. In my case, in the second stage of testing of my chips, one of the things I want to do is literally 'Mind Meld', forming a bridge of 4 sets of compared, independently generated qualia. Ultimately the chips may be implantable, which means a human could experience what they generate in the first person...but I digress Your statement This theory of consciousness can be used to make some falsifiable predictions could be replaced by ANY theory of consciousness can be used to make falsifiable predictions 1..4 as follows.. Which basically says they are not predictions that falsify anything at all. In which case the predictions cannot be claimed to support your theory. The problem is that the evidence of predictions 1-4 acts merely as a correlate. It does not test any particular critical dependency (causality origins). The predictions are merely correlates of any theory of consciousness. They do not test the causal necessities. In any empirical science paper the evidence could not be held in support of the claim and they would be would be discounted as evidence of your mechanism. I could cite 10 different computationalist AGI knowledge metaphors in the sections preceding the 'predictions' and the result would be the same. SoIf I was a reviewer I'd be unable to accept the claim that your 'predictions' actually said anything about the theory preceding them. This would seem to be the problematic issue of the paper. You might want to take a deeper look at this issue and try to isolate something unique to your particular solution - which has a real critical dependency in it. Then you'll have an evidence base of your own that people can use independently. In this way your proposal could be seen to be scientific in the dry empirical sense. By way of example... a computer program is not scientific evidence of anything. The computer materials, as configured by the program, actually causally necessitate the behaviour. The program is a correlate. A correlate has the formal evidentiary status of 'hearsay'. This is the sense in which I invoke the term 'correlate' above. BTW I have fallen foul of this problem myself...I had to look elsewhere for real critical dependency, like I suggested above. You never know, you might find one in there someplace! I found one after a lot of investigation. You might, too. Regards, Colin Hales Okay, let me phrase it like this: I specifically say (or rather I should have done... this is another thing I need to make more explicit!) that the predictions are about making alterations at EXACTLY the boundary of the analysis mechanisms. So, when we test the predictions, we must first understand the mechanics of human (or AGI) cognition well enough to be able to locate the exact scope of the analysis mechanisms. Then, we make the tests by changing things around just outside the reach of those mechanisms. Then we ask subjects (human or AGI) what happened to their subjective experiences. If the subjects are ourselves - which I strongly suggest must be the case - then we can ask ourselves what happened to our subjective experiences. My prediction is that if the swaps are made at that boundary, then things will be as I state. But if changes are made within the scope of the analysis mechanisms, then we will not see those changes in the qualia. So the theory could be falsified if changes in the qualia are NOT consistent with the theory, when changes are made at different points in the system. The theory is all about the analysis mechanisms being the culprit, so in that sense it is extremely falsifiable. Now, correct me if I am wrong, but is there anywhere else in the literature where you have you seen anyone make a prediction that the qualia will be changed by the alteration of a specific mechanism, but not by other, fairly similar alterations? 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Dan Dennett [WAS Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness]
Ben Goertzel wrote: Ed, BTW on this topic my view seems closer to Richard's than yours, though not anywhere near identical to his either. Maybe I'll write a blog post on consciousness to clarify, it's too much for an email... I am very familiar with Dennett's position on consciousness, as I'm sure Richard is, but I consider it a really absurd and silly argument. I'll clarify in a blog post sometime soon, but I don't have time for it now. Anyway, arguing that experience basically doesn't exist, which is what Dennett does, certainly doesn't solve the hard problem as posed by Chalmers ... it just claims that the hard problem doesn't exist... ben Agreed. I like Dennett's analytical style in many ways, but I was disappointed when I realized where he was going with the multiple drafts account. He falls into a classic trap. Chalmers says: Whooaa! There is a big, 3-part problem here: (1) We can barely even define what we mean by consciousness, (2) That fact of its indefinability seems almost intrinsic to the definition of it!, and then (3) Nevertheless, most of us are convinced that there is something significant that needs to be explained here. So Chalmers is *pointing* at the dramatic conjunction of the three things inexplicability, inexplicability that seems intrinsic to the definition and needs to be explained ... and he is saying that these three combined make a very, very hard problem. But then what Dennett does is walk right up and say Whooaa! There is a big problem here: (1) You can barely even define what you mean by consciousness, so you folks are just confused. Chalmers is trying to get Dennett to go upstairs and look at the problem from a higher perspective, but Dennett digs in his heels and insists at looking at the problem *only* from the ground floor level. He can only see the fact there is a problem with defining it, he cannot see the fact that this problem is itself interesting. What I have tried to do is take it one step further and say that if we understand the nature of the confusion we can actually resolve it (albeit in a weird kind of way). 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
Matt Mahoney wrote: --- On Mon, 11/17/08, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Okay, let me phrase it like this: I specifically say (or rather I should have done... this is another thing I need to make more explicit!) that the predictions are about making alterations at EXACTLY the boundary of the analysis mechanisms. So, when we test the predictions, we must first understand the mechanics of human (or AGI) cognition well enough to be able to locate the exact scope of the analysis mechanisms. Then, we make the tests by changing things around just outside the reach of those mechanisms. Then we ask subjects (human or AGI) what happened to their subjective experiences. If the subjects are ourselves - which I strongly suggest must be the case - then we can ask ourselves what happened to our subjective experiences. My prediction is that if the swaps are made at that boundary, then things will be as I state. But if changes are made within the scope of the analysis mechanisms, then we will not see those changes in the qualia. So the theory could be falsified if changes in the qualia are NOT consistent with the theory, when changes are made at different points in the system. The theory is all about the analysis mechanisms being the culprit, so in that sense it is extremely falsifiable. Now, correct me if I am wrong, but is there anywhere else in the literature where you have you seen anyone make a prediction that the qualia will be changed by the alteration of a specific mechanism, but not by other, fairly similar alterations? Your predictions are not testable. How do you know if another person has experienced a change in qualia, or is simply saying that they do? If you do the experiment on yourself, how do you know if you really experience a change in qualia, or only believe that you do? There is a difference, you know. Belief is only a rearrangement of your neurons. I have no doubt that if you did the experiments you describe, that the brains would be rearranged consistently with your predictions. But what does that say about consciousness? Yikes, whatever happened to the incorrigibility of belief?! You seem to have a bone or two to pick with Descartes: please don't ask me! 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
Harry Chesley wrote: On 11/14/2008 9:27 AM, Richard Loosemore wrote: I completed the first draft of a technical paper on consciousness the other day. It is intended for the AGI-09 conference, and it can be found at: http://susaro.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/draft_consciousness_rpwl.pdf Good paper. A related question: How do you explain the fact that we sometimes are aware of qualia and sometimes not? You can perform the same actions paying attention or on auto pilot. In one case, qualia manifest, while in the other they do not. Why is that? I actually *really* like this question: I was trying to compose an answer to it while lying in bed this morning. This is what I started referring to (in a longer version of the paper) as a Consciousness Holiday. In fact, if start unpacking the idea of what we mean by conscious experience, we start to realize that it inly really exists when we look at it. It is not even logically possible to think about consciousness - any form of it, including *memories* of the consciousness that I had a few minutes ago, when I was driving along the road and talking to my companion without bothering to look at several large towns that we drove through - without applying the analysis mechanism to the consciousness episode. So when I don't remember anything about those towns, from a few minutes ago on my road trip, is it because (a) the attentional mechanism did not bother to lay down any episodic memory traces, so I cannot bring back the memories and analyze them, or (b) that I was actually not experiencing any qualia during that time when I was on autopilot? I believe that the answer is (a), and that IF I can stopped at any point during the observation period and thought about the experience I just had, I would be able to appreciate the last few seconds of subjective experience. The real reply to your question goes much much deeper, and it is fascinating because we need to get a handle on creatures that probably do not do any reflective, language-based philosophical thinking (like guinea pigs and crocodiles). I want to say more, but will have to set it down in a longer form. Does this seem to make sense so far, though? 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
Harry Chesley wrote: Richard Loosemore wrote: I completed the first draft of a technical paper on consciousness the other day. It is intended for the AGI-09 conference, and it can be found at: http://susaro.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/draft_consciousness_rpwl.pdf One other point: Although this is a possible explanation for our subjective experience of qualia like red or soft, I don't see it explaining pain or happy quite so easily. You can hypothesize a sort of mechanism-level explanation of those by relegating them to the older or lower parts of the brain (i.e., they're atomic at the conscious level, but have more effects at the physiological level (like releasing chemicals into the system)), but that doesn't satisfactorily cover the subjective side for me. I do have a quick answer to that one. Remember that the core of the model is the *scope* of the analysis mechanism. If there is a sharp boundary (as well there might be), then this defines the point where the qualia kick in. Pain receptors are fairly easy: they are primitive signal lines. Emotions are, I believe, caused by clusters of lower brain structures, so the interface between lower brain and foreground is the place where the foreground sees a limit to the analysis mechanisms. More generally, the significance of the foreground is that it sets a boundary on how far the analysis mechanisms can reach. I am not sure why that would seem less satisfactory as an explanation of the subjectivity. It is a raw feel, and that is the key idea, no? 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
Mark Waser wrote: An excellent question from Harry . . . . So when I don't remember anything about those towns, from a few minutes ago on my road trip, is it because (a) the attentional mechanism did not bother to lay down any episodic memory traces, so I cannot bring back the memories and analyze them, or (b) that I was actually not experiencing any qualia during that time when I was on autopilot? I believe that the answer is (a), and that IF I can stopped at any point during the observation period and thought about the experience I just had, I would be able to appreciate the last few seconds of subjective experience. So . . . . what if the *you* that you/we speak of is simply the attentional mechanism? What if qualia are simply the way that other brain processes appear to you/the attentional mechanism? Why would you be experiencing qualia when you were on autopilot? It's quite clear from experiments that human's don't see things in their visual field when they are concentrating on other things in their visual field (for example, when you are told to concentrate on counting something that someone is doing in the foreground while a man in an ape suit walks by in the background). Do you really have qualia from stuff that you don't sense (even though your sensory apparatus picked it up, it was clearly discarded at some level below the conscious/attentional level)? Yes, I did not mean to imply that all unattended stimuli register in consciousness. Clearly there are things that are simply not seen, even when they are in the visual field. But I would distinguish between that and a situation where you drive for 50 miles and do not have a memory afterwards of the places you went through. I do not think that we do not see the road and the towns and other traffic in the same sense that we do not see an unattended stimulus in a dual task experiment, for example. But then, there are probably intermediate cases. Some of the recent neural imaging work is relevant in this respect. I will think some more about this whole issue. Richard Loosemore - Original Message - From: Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Monday, November 17, 2008 1:46 PM Subject: **SPAM** Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness Harry Chesley wrote: On 11/14/2008 9:27 AM, Richard Loosemore wrote: I completed the first draft of a technical paper on consciousness the other day. It is intended for the AGI-09 conference, and it can be found at: http://susaro.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/draft_consciousness_rpwl.pdf Good paper. A related question: How do you explain the fact that we sometimes are aware of qualia and sometimes not? You can perform the same actions paying attention or on auto pilot. In one case, qualia manifest, while in the other they do not. Why is that? I actually *really* like this question: I was trying to compose an answer to it while lying in bed this morning. This is what I started referring to (in a longer version of the paper) as a Consciousness Holiday. In fact, if start unpacking the idea of what we mean by conscious experience, we start to realize that it inly really exists when we look at it. It is not even logically possible to think about consciousness - any form of it, including *memories* of the consciousness that I had a few minutes ago, when I was driving along the road and talking to my companion without bothering to look at several large towns that we drove through - without applying the analysis mechanism to the consciousness episode. So when I don't remember anything about those towns, from a few minutes ago on my road trip, is it because (a) the attentional mechanism did not bother to lay down any episodic memory traces, so I cannot bring back the memories and analyze them, or (b) that I was actually not experiencing any qualia during that time when I was on autopilot? I believe that the answer is (a), and that IF I can stopped at any point during the observation period and thought about the experience I just had, I would be able to appreciate the last few seconds of subjective experience. The real reply to your question goes much much deeper, and it is fascinating because we need to get a handle on creatures that probably do not do any reflective, language-based philosophical thinking (like guinea pigs and crocodiles). I want to say more, but will have to set it down in a longer form. Does this seem to make sense so far, though? 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
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
Sorry for the late reply. Got interrupted. Vladimir Nesov wrote: (I'm sorry that I make some unclear statements on semantics/meaning, I'll probably get to the description of this perspective later on the blog (or maybe it'll become obsolete before that), but it's a long story, and writing it up on the spot isn't an option.) On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 2:18 AM, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Taking the position that consciousness is an epiphenomenon and is therefore meaningless has difficulties. Rather p-zombieness in atom-by-atom the same environment is an epiphenomenon. By saying that it is an epiphenomenon, you actually do not answer the questions about instrinsic qualities and how they relate to other things in the universe. The key point is that we do have other examples of epiphenomena (e.g. smoke from a steam train), What do you mean by smoke being epiphenomenal? The standard philosophical term, no? A phenomenon that is associated with something, but which plays no causal role in the functioning of that something. Thus: smoke coming from a steam train is always there when is running, but the smoke does not cause the steam train to do anything. It is just a byproduct. but their ontological status is very clear: they are things in the world. We do not know of other things with such puzzling ontology (like consciousness), that we can use as a clear analogy, to explain what consciousness is. Also, it raises the question of *why* there should be an epiphenomenon. Calling it an E does not tell us why such a thing should happen. And it leaves us in the dark about whether or not to believe that other systems that are not atom-for-atom identical with us, should also have this epiphenomenon. I don't know how to parse the word epiphenomenon in this context. I use to to describe reference-free, meaningless concepts, so you can't say that some epiphenomenon is present here or there, that would be meaningless. I think the problem is that you are confusing epiphenomenon with something else. Where did you get the idea that an epiphenomenon was a reference-free, meaningless concept? Not from Eliezer's reference-free, meaningless ramblings on his blog, I hope? ;-) Jumping into molecular framework as describing human cognition is unwarranted. It could be a description of AGI design, or it could be a theoretical description of more general epistemology, but as presented it's not general enough to automatically correspond to the brain. Also, semantics of atoms is tricky business, for all I know it keeps shifting with the focus of attention, often dramatically. Saying that self is a cluster of atoms doesn't cut it. I'm not sure of what you are saying, exactly. The framework is general in this sense: its components have *clear* counterparts in all models of cognition, both human and machine. So, for example, if you look at a system that uses logical reasoning and bare symbols, that formalism will differentiate between the symbols that are currently active, and playing a role in the system's analysis of the world, and those that are not active. That is the distinction between foreground and background. Without a working, functional theory of cognition, this high-level descriptive picture has little explanatory power. It might be a step towards developing a useful theory, but it doesn't explain anything. There is a set of states of mind that correlates with experience of apples, etc. So what? You can't build a detailed edifice on general principles and claim that far-reaching conclusions apply to actual brain. They might, but you need a semantic link from theory to described functionality. Sorry, I don't follow you here. If you think that there was some aspect of the framework that might NOt show up in some architecture for a thinking system, you should probably point to it. I think that the architecture was general, but it referred to a specific component (the analysis mechanism) that was well-specified enough to be usable in the theory. And that was all I needed. If there is some specific way that it doesn't work, you will probably have to pin it down and tell me, because I don't see it. As for the self symbol, there was no time to go into detail. But there clearly is an atom that represents the self. *shug* It only stands as definition, there is no self-neuron, or something easily identifiable as self, it's a complex thing. I'm not sure I even understand what self refers to subjectively, I don't feel any clear focus of self-perception, my experience is filled with thoughts on many things, some of them involving management of thought process, some of external concepts, but no unified center to speak of... No, no: what I meant by self was that somewhere in the system it must have a representation for its own self, or it will have a missing concept. Also, in any system there is a basic source of action some place
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
Colin Hales wrote: Richard Loosemore wrote: Colin Hales wrote: Dear Richard, I have an issue with the 'falsifiable predictions' being used as evidence of your theory. The problem is that right or wrong...I have a working physical model for consciousness. Predictions 1-3 are something that my hardware can do easily. In fact that kind of experimentation is in my downstream implementation plan. These predictions have nothing whatsoever to do with your theory or mine or anyones. I'm not sure about prediction 4. It's not something I have thought about, so I'll leave it aside for now. In my case, in the second stage of testing of my chips, one of the things I want to do is literally 'Mind Meld', forming a bridge of 4 sets of compared, independently generated qualia. Ultimately the chips may be implantable, which means a human could experience what they generate in the first person...but I digress Your statement This theory of consciousness can be used to make some falsifiable predictions could be replaced by ANY theory of consciousness can be used to make falsifiable predictions 1..4 as follows.. Which basically says they are not predictions that falsify anything at all. In which case the predictions cannot be claimed to support your theory. The problem is that the evidence of predictions 1-4 acts merely as a correlate. It does not test any particular critical dependency (causality origins). The predictions are merely correlates of any theory of consciousness. They do not test the causal necessities. In any empirical science paper the evidence could not be held in support of the claim and they would be would be discounted as evidence of your mechanism. I could cite 10 different computationalist AGI knowledge metaphors in the sections preceding the 'predictions' and the result would be the same. SoIf I was a reviewer I'd be unable to accept the claim that your 'predictions' actually said anything about the theory preceding them. This would seem to be the problematic issue of the paper. You might want to take a deeper look at this issue and try to isolate something unique to your particular solution - which has a real critical dependency in it. Then you'll have an evidence base of your own that people can use independently. In this way your proposal could be seen to be scientific in the dry empirical sense. By way of example... a computer program is not scientific evidence of anything. The computer materials, as configured by the program, actually causally necessitate the behaviour. The program is a correlate. A correlate has the formal evidentiary status of 'hearsay'. This is the sense in which I invoke the term 'correlate' above. BTW I have fallen foul of this problem myself...I had to look elsewhere for real critical dependency, like I suggested above. You never know, you might find one in there someplace! I found one after a lot of investigation. You might, too. Regards, Colin Hales Okay, let me phrase it like this: I specifically say (or rather I should have done... this is another thing I need to make more explicit!) that the predictions are about making alterations at EXACTLY the boundary of the analysis mechanisms. So, when we test the predictions, we must first understand the mechanics of human (or AGI) cognition well enough to be able to locate the exact scope of the analysis mechanisms. Then, we make the tests by changing things around just outside the reach of those mechanisms. Then we ask subjects (human or AGI) what happened to their subjective experiences. If the subjects are ourselves - which I strongly suggest must be the case - then we can ask ourselves what happened to our subjective experiences. My prediction is that if the swaps are made at that boundary, then things will be as I state. But if changes are made within the scope of the analysis mechanisms, then we will not see those changes in the qualia. So the theory could be falsified if changes in the qualia are NOT consistent with the theory, when changes are made at different points in the system. The theory is all about the analysis mechanisms being the culprit, so in that sense it is extremely falsifiable. Now, correct me if I am wrong, but is there anywhere else in the literature where you have you seen anyone make a prediction that the qualia will be changed by the alteration of a specific mechanism, but not by other, fairly similar alterations? Richard Loosemore At the risk of lecturing the already-informed ---Qualia generation has been highly localised into specific regions in *cranial *brain material already. Qualia are not in the periphery. Qualia are not in the spinal CNS, Qualia are not in the cranial periphery eg eyes or lips. Qualia are generated in specific CNS cortex and basal regions. You are assuming that my references to the *foreground* periphery correspond to the physical brain's periphery
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
This commentary represents a fundamental misunderstanding of both the paper I wrote and the background literature on the hard problem of consciousness. Richard Loosemore Ed Porter wrote: I respect the amount of thought that when into Richard’s paper “Consciousness in Human and Machine: A Theory and Some Falsifiable Predictions” --- but I do not think it provides a good explanation of consciousness. It seems to spend more time explaining the limitations on what we can know about consciousness than explaining consciousness, itself. What little the paper says about consciousness can be summed up roughly as follows: that consciousness is created by a system that can analyze and seek explanations from some, presumably experientially-learned, knowledgebase, based on associations between nodes in that knowledgebase, and that it can determine when it cannot describe a given node further, in terms of relations to other nodes, but nevertheless senses the given node is real (such as the way it is difficult for a human to explain what it is like to sense the color red). First I disagree with the paper’s allegation that “analysis” of conscious phenomena necessarily “bottom” out more than analyses of many other aspects of reality. Second, I disagree that conscious phenomena are beyond any scientific explanation. With regard to the first, I feel our minds contain substantial memories of various conscious states, and thus there is actually substantial experiential grounding of many aspects of consciousness recorded in our brains. This is particularly true for the consciousness of emotional states (for example, brain scans on very young infants indicate a high percent of their mental activity is in emotional centers of the brain). I developed many of my concepts of how to design an AGI based on reading brain science and performing introspection into my own conscious and subconscious thought processes, and I found it quite easy to draw many generalities from the behavior of my own conscious mind. Since I view the subconscious to be at the same time both a staging area for, and a reactive audience for, conscious thoughts, I think one has to view the subconscious and consciouness as part of a functioning whole. When I think of the color red, I don’t bottom out. Instead I have many associations with my experiences of redness that provide it with deep grounding. As with the description of any other concept, it is hard to explain how I experience red to others, other than through experiences we share relating to that concept. This would include things we see in common to be red, or perhaps common emotional experiences to seeing the red of blood that has been spilled in violence, or the way the sensation of red seems to fill a 2 dimensional portion of an image that we perceive as a two dimensional distribution of differently colored areas. But I can communicate within my own mind across time what it is like to sense red, such as in dreams when my eyes are closed. Yes, the experience of sensing red does not decompose into parts, such as the way the sensed image of a human body can be de-composed into the seeing of subordinate parts, but that does not necessarily mean that my sensing of something that is a certain color of red, is somehow more mysterious than my sensing of seeing a human body. With regard to the second notion, that conscious phenomena are not subject to scientific explanation, there is extensive evidence to the contrary. The prescient psychological writings of William James, and Dr. Alexander Luria’s famous studies of the effects of variously located bullet wounds on the minds of Russian soldiers after World War II, both illustrate that human consciousness can be scientifically studied. The effects of various drugs on consciousness have been scientifically studied. Multiple experiments have shown that the presence or absence of synchrony between neural firings in various parts of the brain have been strongly correlated with human subjects reporting the presence or absence, respectively, of conscious experience of various thoughts or sensory inputs. Multiple studies have shown that electrode stimulation to different parts of the brain tend to make the human consciousness aware of different thoughts. Our own personal experiences with our own individual consciousnesses, the current scientific levels of knowledge about commonly reported conscious experiences, and increasingly more sophisticated ways to correlate objectively observable brain states with various reports of human conscious experience, all indicate that consciousness already is subject to scientific explanation. In the future, particularly with the advent of much more sophisticated brain scanning tools, and with the development of AGI, consciousness will be much more subject to scientific explanation
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
John G. Rose wrote: From: Richard Loosemore [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] I completed the first draft of a technical paper on consciousness the other day. It is intended for the AGI-09 conference, and it can be found at: http://susaro.com/wp- content/uploads/2008/11/draft_consciousness_rpwl.pdf Um... this is a model of consciousness. One way of looking at it. Whether or not it is comprehensive enough, not sure, this irreducible indeterminacy. But after reading the paper a couple times I get what you are trying to describe. It's part of an essence of consciousness but not sure if it enough. But did you notice that the paper argued that if you think on the base level, you would have to have that feeling that, as you put it, ...It's part of an essence of consciousness but not sure if it enough.? The question is: does the explanation seem consistent with an explanation of your feeling that it might not be enough of an explanation? 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
Matt Mahoney wrote: --- On Sat, 11/15/08, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Matt Mahoney wrote: --- On Sat, 11/15/08, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This is equivalent to your prediction #2 where connecting the output of neurons that respond to the sound of a cello to the input of neurons that respond to red would cause a cello to sound red. We should expect the effect to be temporary. I'm not sure how this demonstrates consciousness. How do you test that the subject actually experiences redness at the sound of a cello, rather than just behaving as if experiencing redness, for example, claiming to hear red? You misunderstand the experiment in a very intersting way! This experiment has to be done on the *skeptic* herself! The prediction is that if *you* get your brain rewired, *you* will experience this. How do you know what I experience, as opposed to what I claim to experience? That is exactly the question you started with, so you haven't gotten anywhere. I don't need proof that I experience things. I already have that belief programmed into my brain. Huh? Now what are we talking about... I am confused: I was talking about proving my prediction. I simply replied to your doubt about whether a subject woudl be experiencing the predicted effects, or just producing language consistent with it. I gave you a solution by pointing out that anyone who had an interest in the prediction could themselves join in and be a subject. That seemed to answer your original question. You are confusing truth and belief. I am not asking you to make me believe that consciousness (that which distinguishes you from a philosophical zombie) exists. I already believe that. I am asking you to prove it. You haven't done that. I don't believe you can prove the existence of anything that is both detectable and not detectable. You are stuck in Level 0. I showed something a great deal more sophisticated. In fact, I explicitly agreed with you on a Level 0 version of what you just said: I actually said in the paper that I (and anyone else) cannot explain these phenomena qua the (Level 0) things that they appear to be. But I went far beyond that: I explained why people have difficulty defining these terms, and I explained a self-consistent understanding of the nature of consciousness that involves it being classified as a novel type of thing. You cannot define in properly. I can explain why you cannot define in properly. I can both define and explain it, and part of that explanation is that the very nature of explanation is bound up in the solution. But instead of understanding that the nature of explanation has to change to deal with the problem, you remain stuck with the old, broken idea of explanation, and keep trying to beat the argument with it! 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
Ed Porter wrote: Richard, You have provided no basis for your argument that I have misunderstood your paper and the literature upon which it is based. [snip] My position is that we can actually describe a fairly large number of characteristics of our subjective experience consciousness that most other intelligent people agree with. Although we cannot know that others experience the color red exactly the same way we do, we can determine that there are multiple shared describable characteristics that most people claim to have with regard to their subjective experiences of the color red. This is what I meant when I said that you had completely misunderstood both my paper and the background literature: the statement in the above paragraph could only be written by a person who does not understand the distinction between the Hard Problem of consciousness (this being David Chalmers' term for it) and the Easy problems. The precise definition of qualia, which everyone agrees on, and which you are flatly contradicting here, is that these things do not involve anything that can be compared across individuals. Since this an utterly fundamental concept, if you do not get this then it is almost impossible to discuss the topic. Matt just tried to explain it to you. You did not get it even then. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
Ben Goertzel wrote: Ed / Richard, It seems to me that Richard's propsal is in large part a modernization of Peirce's metaphysical analysis of awareness. Peirce introduced foundational metaphysical categories of First, Second and Third ... where First is defined as raw unanalyzable awareness/being ... http://www.helsinki.fi/science/commens/terms/firstness.html To me, Richard's analysis sounds a lot like Peirce's statement that consciousness is First... And Ed's refutation sounds like a rejection of First as a meaningful category, and an attempt to redirect the conversation to the level of Third... Sorry to be negative, but no, my proposal is not in any way a modernization of Peirce's metaphysical analysis of awareness. The standard meaning of Hard Problem issues was described very well by Chalmers, and I am addressing the hard problem of concsciousness, not the other problems. Ed is talking about consciousness in a way that plainly wanders back and forth between Hard Problem issues and Easy Problem, and as such he has misunderstood the entirety of what I wrote in the paper. It might be arguable that my position relates to Feigl, but even that is significantly different. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
Mike Tintner wrote: Richard:The precise definition of qualia, which everyone agrees on, and which you are flatly contradicting here, is that these things do not involve anything that can be compared across individuals. Actually, we don't do a bad job of comparing our emotions/sensations - not remotely perfect, but not remotely as bad as the above philosophy would suggest. We do share each other's pains and joys to a remarkable extent. That's because our emotions are very much materially based and we share basically the same bodies and nervous systems. The hard problem of consciousness is primarily about *not* qualia/emotions/sensations but *sentience* - not about what a red bus or a warm hand stroking your face feel like to you, but about your capacity to feel anything at all - about your capacity not for particular types of emotions/sensations, but for emotion generally. Sentience resides to a great extent in the nervous system, and whatever proto-nervous system preceded it in evolution. When we solve how that works we may solve the hard problem. Unless you believe that every thing including inanimate objects, feels, then the capacity of sentience clearly evolved and has an explanation. (Bear in mind that AGI-ers' approaches to the problem of consciousness are bound to be limited by their disembodied and anti-evolutionary prejudices). Mike Hard Problem is a technical term. It was invented by David Chalmers, and it has a very specific meaning. See the Chalmers reference in my paper. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
Three things. First, David Chalmers is considered one of the world's foremost researchers in the consciousness field (he is certainly now the most celebrated). He has read the argument presented in my paper, and he has discussed it with me. He understood all of it, and he does not share any of your concerns, nor anything remotely like your concerns. He had one single reservation, on a technical point, but when I explained my answer, he thought it interesting and novel, and possibly quite valid. Second, the remainder of your comments below are not coherent enough to be answerable, and it is not my job to walk you through the basics of this field. Third, about your digression: gravity does not escape from black holes, because gravity is just the curvature of spacetime. The other things that cannot escape from black holes are not forces. I will not be replying to any further messages from you because you are wasting my time. Richard Loosemore Ed Porter wrote: Richard, Thank you for your reply. It implies your article was not as clearly worded as I would have liked it to have been, given the interpretation you say it is limited to. When you said subjective phenomena associated with consciousness ... have the special status of being unanalyzable. (last paragraph in the first column of page 4 of your paper.) you apparently meant something much more narrow, such as subjective phenomena associated with consciousness [of the type that cannot be communicated between people --- and/or --- of the type that are unanalyzable] ... have the special status of being unanalyzable. If you always intended that all your statements about the limited ability to analyze conscious phenomena be so limited --- then you were right --- I misunderstood your article, at least partially. We could argue about whether a reader should have understood this narrow interpretation. But it should be noted Wikipedia, that unquestionable font of human knowledge, states “qualia” has multiple definitions, only some of which matche the meaning you claim “everyone agrees upon.”, i.e., subjective experiences that “do not involve anything that can be compared across individuals.” And in Wikipedia’s description of Chalmers’ hard problem of consciousness, it lists questions that arguably would be covered by my interpretation. It is your paper, and it is up to you to decide how you define things, and how clearly you make your definitions known. But even given your narrow interpretation of conscious phenomena in your paper, I think there are important additional statements that can be made concerning it. First given some of the definitions of Chalmers hard problem it is not clear how much your definition adds. Second, and more importantly, I do not think there is a totally clear distinction between Chalmers’ “hard problem of consciousness” and what he classifies as the easy problems of consciousness. For example, the first two paragraphs on the second page of your paper seem to be discusses the unanalyzable nature of the hard problem. This includes the following statement: “…for every “objective” definition that has ever been proposed [for the hard problem], it seems, someone has countered that the real mystery has been side-stepped by the definition.” If you define the hard problem of consciousness as being those aspects of consciousness that cannot be physically explained, it is like the hard problems concerning physical reality. It would seem that many key aspects of physical reality are equally “intrinsically beyond the reach of objective definition, while at the same time being as deserving of explanation as anything else in the universe” (Second paragraph on page 2 of your paper). Over time we have explained more and more about concepts at the heart of physical reality such as time, space, existence, but always some mystery remains. I think the same will be true about consciousness. In the coming decades we will be able to explain more and more about consciousness, and what is covered by the “hard problem” (i.e., that which is unexplainable) will shrink, but there will always remain some mystery. I believe that within decades two to six decades we will --be able to examine the physical manifestations of aspects of qualia that now cannot now be communicated between people (and thus now fit within your definition of qualia); --have an explanation for most of the major types of subjectively perceived properties and behaviors of consciousness; and --be able to posit reasonable theories about why we experience consciousness as a sense of awareness and how the various properties of that sense of awareness are created. But I believe there will always remain some mysteries, such as why there is any existence of anything, why there is any separation of anything, why there is any
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
dead-end concept-atoms. Richard Loosemore On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 11:44 PM, Matt Mahoney [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- On Fri, 11/14/08, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://susaro.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/draft_consciousness_rpwl.pdf Interesting that some of your predictions have already been tested, in particular, synaesthetic qualia was described by George Stratton in 1896. When people wear glasses that turn images upside down, they adapt after several days and begin to see the world normally. http://www.cns.nyu.edu/~nava/courses/psych_and_brain/pdfs/Stratton_1896.pdf http://www.cns.nyu.edu/%7Enava/courses/psych_and_brain/pdfs/Stratton_1896.pdf http://wearcam.org/tetherless/node4.html This is equivalent to your prediction #2 where connecting the output of neurons that respond to the sound of a cello to the input of neurons that respond to red would cause a cello to sound red. We should expect the effect to be temporary. I'm not sure how this demonstrates consciousness. How do you test that the subject actually experiences redness at the sound of a cello, rather than just behaving as if experiencing redness, for example, claiming to hear red? I can do a similar experiment with autobliss (a program that learns a 2 input logic function by reinforcement). If I swapped the inputs, the program would make mistakes at first, but adapt after a few dozen training sessions. So autobliss meets one of the requirements for qualia. The other is that it be advanced enough to introspect on itself, and that which it cannot analyze (describe in terms of simpler phenomena) is qualia. What you describe as elements are neurons in a connectionist model, and the atoms are the set of active neurons. Analysis means describing a neuron in terms of its inputs. Then qualia is the first layer of a feedforward network. In this respect, autobliss is a single neuron with 4 inputs, and those inputs are therefore its qualia. You might object that autobliss is not advanced enough to ponder its own self existence. Perhaps you define advanced to mean it is capable of language (pass the Turing test), but I don't think that's what you meant. In that case, you need to define more carefully what qualifies as sufficiently powerful. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] --- 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/?; https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. -- Robert Heinlein *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modify https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Your Subscription [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=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
Matt Mahoney wrote: --- On Sat, 11/15/08, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This is equivalent to your prediction #2 where connecting the output of neurons that respond to the sound of a cello to the input of neurons that respond to red would cause a cello to sound red. We should expect the effect to be temporary. I'm not sure how this demonstrates consciousness. How do you test that the subject actually experiences redness at the sound of a cello, rather than just behaving as if experiencing redness, for example, claiming to hear red? You misunderstand the experiment in a very intersting way! This experiment has to be done on the *skeptic* herself! The prediction is that if *you* get your brain rewired, *you* will experience this. How do you know what I experience, as opposed to what I claim to experience? That is exactly the question you started with, so you haven't gotten anywhere. I don't need proof that I experience things. I already have that belief programmed into my brain. Huh? Now what are we talking about... I am confused: I was talking about proving my prediction. I simply replied to your doubt about whether a subject woudl be experiencing the predicted effects, or just producing language consistent with it. I gave you a solution by pointing out that anyone who had an interest in the prediction could themselves join in and be a subject. That seemed to answer your original question. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
I completed the first draft of a technical paper on consciousness the other day. It is intended for the AGI-09 conference, and it can be found at: http://susaro.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/draft_consciousness_rpwl.pdf The title is Consciousness in Human and Machine: A Theory and Some Falsifiable Predictions, and it does solve the problem, believe it or not. But I have no illusions: it will be misunderstood, at the very least. I expect there will be plenty of people who argue that it does not solve the problem, but I don't really care, because I think history will eventually show that this is indeed the right answer. It gives a satisfying answer to all the outstanding questions and it feels right. Oh, and it does make some testable predictions. Alas, we do not yet have the technology to perform the tests yet, but the predictions are on the table, anyhow. In a longer version I would go into a lot more detail, introducing the background material at more length, analyzing the other proposals that have been made and fleshing out the technical aspects along several dimensions. But the size limit for the conference was 6 pages, so that was all I could cram in. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
Derek Zahn wrote: Oh, one other thing I forgot to mention. To reach my cheerful conclusion about your paper, I have to be willing to accept your model of cognition. I'm pretty easy on that premise-granting, by which I mean that I'm normally willing to go along with architectural suggestions to see where they lead. But I will be curious to see whether others are also willing to go along with you on your generic cognitive system model. That's an interesting point. In fact, the argument doesn't change too much if we go to other models of cognition, it just looks different ... and more complicated, which is partly why I wanted to stick with my own formalism. The crucial part is that there has to be a very powerful mechanism that lets the system analyze its own concepts - it has to be able to reflect on its own knowledge in a very recursive kind of way. Now, I think that Novamente, OpenCog and other systems will eventually have that sort of capability because it is such a crucial part of the general bit in artificial general intelligence. Once a system has that mechanism, I can use it to take the line I took in the paper. Also, the generic model of cognition was useful to me in the later part of the paper where I want to analyze semantics. Other AGI architectures (logical ones for example) implicitly stick with the very strict kinds of semantics (possible worlds, e.g.) that I actually think cannot be made to work for all of cognition. Anyhow, thanks for your positive comments. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
Robert Swaine wrote: Conciousness is akin to the phlogiston theory in chemistry. It is likely a shadow concept, similar to how the bodily reactions make us feel that the heart is the seat of emotions. Gladly, cardiologist and heart surgeons do not look for a spirit, a soul, or kindness in the heart muscle. The brain organ need not contain anything beyond the means to effect physical behavior,.. and feedback as to those behavior. A finite degree of sensory awareness serves as a suitable replacement for consciousness, in otherwords, just feedback. Would it really make a difference if we were all biological machines, and our perceptions were the same as other animals, or other designed minds; more so if we were in a simulated existence. The search for consciousness is a misleading (though not entirely fruitless) path to AGI. Well, with respect, it does sound as though you did not read the paper itself, or any of the other books like Chalmers' Conscious Mind. I say this because there are lengthy (and standard) replies to the points that you make, both in the paper and in the literature. And, please don't misunderstand: this is not a path to AGI. Just an important side issue that the geneal public cares about enormously. Richard Loosemore --- On Fri, 11/14/08, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From: Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness To: agi@v2.listbox.com Date: Friday, November 14, 2008, 12:27 PM I completed the first draft of a technical paper on consciousness the other day. It is intended for the AGI-09 conference, and it can be found at: http://susaro.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/draft_consciousness_rpwl.pdf The title is Consciousness in Human and Machine: A Theory and Some Falsifiable Predictions, and it does solve the problem, believe it or not. But I have no illusions: it will be misunderstood, at the very least. I expect there will be plenty of people who argue that it does not solve the problem, but I don't really care, because I think history will eventually show that this is indeed the right answer. It gives a satisfying answer to all the outstanding questions and it feels right. Oh, and it does make some testable predictions. Alas, we do not yet have the technology to perform the tests yet, but the predictions are on the table, anyhow. In a longer version I would go into a lot more detail, introducing the background material at more length, analyzing the other proposals that have been made and fleshing out the technical aspects along several dimensions. But the size limit for the conference was 6 pages, so that was all I could cram in. 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=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Ethics of computer-based cognitive experimentation
John G. Rose wrote: From: Richard Loosemore [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] John LaMuth wrote: Reality check *** Consciousness is an emergent spectrum of subjectivity spanning 600 mill. years of evolution involving mega-trillions of competing organisms, probably selecting for obscure quantum effects/efficiencies Our puny engineering/coding efforts could never approach this - not even in a million years. An outwardly pragmatic language simulation, however, is very do-able. John LaMuth It is not. And we can. I thought what he said was a good description more or less. Out of 600 millions years there may be only a fraction of that which is an improvement but it's still there. How do you know, beyond a reasonable doubt, that any other being is conscious? The problem is, you have to nail down exactly what you *mean* by the word conscious before you start asking questions or making statements. Once you start reading about and thinking about all the attempts that have been made to get specific about it, some interesting new answers to simple questions like this begin to emerge. What I am fighting here is a tendency for some people to use wave-of-the-hand definitions that only capture a fraction of a percent of the real meaning of the term. And sometimes not even that. At some point you have to trust that others are conscious, in the same species, you bring them into your recursive loop of consciousness component mix. A primary component of consciousness is a self definition. Conscious experience is unique to the possessor. It is more than a belief that the possessor herself is conscious but others who appear conscious may be just that, appearing to be conscious. Though at some point there is enough feedback between individuals and/or a group to share consciousness experience. Still though, is it really necessary for an AGI to be conscious? Except for delivering warm fuzzies to the creators? Doesn't that complicate things? Shouldn't the machines/computers be slaves to man? Or will they be equal/superior. It's a dog-eat-dog world out there. One of the main conclusions of the paper I am writing now is that you will (almost certainly) have no choice in the matter, because a sufficiently powerful type of AGI will be conscious whether you like it or not. The question of slavery is completely orthogonal. I just want things to be taken care of and no issues. Consciousness brings issues. Intelligence and consciousness are separate. Back to my first paragraph above: until you have thought carefully about what you mean by consciousness, and have figured out where it comes from, you can't really make a definitive statement like that, surely? And besides, the wanting to have things taken care of bit is a separate issue. That is not a problem, either way. 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Ethics of computer-based cognitive experimentation
Matt Mahoney wrote: --- On Tue, 11/11/08, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Matt Mahoney wrote: --- On Tue, 11/11/08, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Your 'belief' explanation is a cop-out because it does not address any of the issues that need to be addressed for something to count as a definition or an explanation of the facts that need to be explained. As I explained, animals that have no concept of death have nevertheless evolved to fear most of the things that can kill them. Humans have learned to associate these things with death, and invented the concept of consciousness as the large set of features which distinguishes living humans from dead humans. Thus, humans fear the loss or destruction of consciousness, which is equivalent to death. Consciousness, free will, qualia, and good and bad are universal human beliefs. We should not confuse them with truth by asking the wrong questions. Thus, Turing sidestepped the question of can machines think? by asking instead can machines appear to think? Since we can't (by definition) distinguish doing something from appearing to do something, it makes no sense for us to make this distinction. The above two paragraphs STILL do not address any of the issues that need to be addressed for something to count as a definition, or an explanation of the facts that need to be explained. And you STILL have not defined what consciousness is. Logically, I don't need to define something to point out that your definition fails to address any of the issues that I can read about in e.g. Chalmers' book on the subject. ;-) 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Ethics of computer-based cognitive experimentation
Jiri Jelinek wrote: On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 2:41 AM, John G. Rose [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: is it really necessary for an AGI to be conscious? Depends on how you define it. H interesting angle. Everything you say from this point on seems to be predicated on the idea that a person can *choose* to define it any way they want, and then run with their definition. I notice that this is not possible with any other scientific concept - we don't just define an electron as Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun To Be With and then start drawing conclusions. The same is true of consciousness. Richard Loosemore If you think it's about feelings/qualia then - no - you don't need that [potentially dangerous] crap + we don't know how to implement it anyway. If you view it as high-level built-in response mechanism (which is supported by feelings in our brain but can/should be done differently in AGI) then yes - you practically (but not necessarily theoretically) need something like that for performance. If you are concerned about self-awareness/consciousness then note that AGI can demonstrate general problem solving without knowing anything about itself (and about many other particular concepts). The AGI just should be able to learn new concepts (including self), though I think some built-in support makes sense in this particular case. BTW for the purpose of my AGI RD I defined self-awareness as a use of an internal representation (IR) of self, where the IR is linked to real features of the system. Nothing terribly complicated or mysterious about that. Doesn't that complicate things? it does Shouldn't the machines/computers be slaves to man? They should and it shouldn't be viewed negatively. It's nothing more than a smart tool. Changing that would be a big mistake IMO. Or will they be equal/superior. Rocks are superior to us in being hard. Cars are superior to us when it comes to running fast. AGIs will be superior to us when it comes to problem solving. So what? Equal/superior in whatever - who cares as long as we can progress safely enjoy life - which is what our tools (including AGI) are being designed to help us with. Regards, Jiri Jelinek --- 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=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Ethics of computer-based cognitive experimentation
Jiri Jelinek wrote: Richard, Everything you say from this point on seems to be predicated on the idea that a person can *choose* to define it any way they want There are some good-to-stick-with rules for definitions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition#Rules_for_definition_by_genus_and_differentia but (even though it's not desirable) in some cases it's IMO ok for researchers to use a bit different definitions. If you can give us the *ultimate* definition of consciousness then I would certainly be interested. I promise I'll not ask for the ultimate cross-domain definition of every single word used in that definition ;-) Hey, no problem, but I'm now embarrassed and in an awkward position, because I am literally trying to do that. I am trying to sort the problem out once and for all. I am finishing it for submission to AGI-09, so it will be done, ready or not, by the end of today. This is something I started as a student essay in 1986, but I have been trying to nail down a testable prediction that can be applied today, rather than in 20 years time. I do have testable predictions, but not ones that can be tested today, alas. As for the question about definitions, sure, it is true that the rules are not cut in stone for how to do it. It's just that consciousness is a rats nest of conflicting definitions 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/?member_id=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
