[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I propose that *any* successful AGI design will be a design, instead
of in reason, *in the technology of spirit*.
Now, by spirit, I don't mean the Let's go pray to lunar crystals
snake oil-kind. I mean a real, all-encompasing, perspective on what it
means to be.
No doubt many AI'ers will claim spirit is irrelevant. No doubt some
will claim that spirit is an emergent property of general
intelligence. But I'm inclined (largely for rational reasons and
partly for intuition) to disagree. Regarding the first point, I don't
believe that spirit is irrelevant. Rather, I believe it is essential
to intelligence. You can't have AGI without human-GI's ability to
percieve spirit. Regarding the second point, I really doubt that
spirit could be an emergent property of AGI. How can the whole emerge
from the part unless the part already contains it?
The problem, as I'm sure you realized, is that you can't go up to an AGI
researcher and say: Build me an AI that includes spirit. Well, you can
take that physical action. But if you say it one of the usual run of AGI
researchers, one of two things will happen:
1) The AGI researcher will say: Spirit is poorly defined, not
realizing that humans start out with an extremely poorly defined intuitive
view of things like intelligence, spirit, emotion, reality, truth, et
cetera, and that it is a necessary part of the job of creating AI to
create clearly defined naturalistic views that completely, clearly, and
satisfyingly encompass all these realms.
2) The AGI researcher will invent a spur-of-the moment definition for
spirit which doesn't really match what you're interested in - it doesn't
provide a detailed naturalistic view which, when you see it, is fully and
satisfyingly identifiable with what you were interested in. But the AGI
researcher will insist that the definition must embrace spirit for some
reason or other, just as earlier AGI researchers insisted that search
trees, three-layer neural networks, semantic nets, frames, agents, et
cetera, carried within them all the complexity of the mind.
What you have is an intuition that something has been left undone in
traditional models of AGI. You don't know what's missing - you just know
that it is. This intuition tends to be missing in most AGI researchers.
If they had the ability to tell when their theories were missing something
critical they would not be launching AGI projects based on incomplete
theories. There is a selection effect at work; people who know they don't
understand the mind don't become AI researchers. But nonetheless,
although you know something has been left undone, you don't really know
*what* has been left undone. You can't describe it in enough detail to
create it; if you could do that you would be a (true) AGI creator
yourself. All you can do is insist that something is missing. And it is
a sad fact that you will not get very far with this insistence - even
though you are, for the record, correct.
I think I understand what you're calling spirit. I think I understand
it well enough to deliberately transfer it from humans, where it exists
now, into another kind of rational-moral empirical regularity called a
Friendly AI. I would say, from within that understanding, that you are
correct in that spirit is not emergent... very little is, really.
Emergence in AGI is mostly an excuse for not understanding things. If
you don't understand something, you can't create it, and you certainly
can't know in advance that it will emerge.
In the physical natural sciences, where emergence really is the most
useful paradigm for understanding most phenomena, you would be laughed out
of the lecture hall if you showed a picture of the Sun's corona and
insisted that you'd finally got the corona all figured out: It's an
emergent phenomenon of the Sun! But of course this explanation tells
us nothing about *how* the corona emerges from the Sun and whether we're
likely to see an analogous phenomenon appear in a glass of water or a
Bose-Einstein condensate. All that emergence says is that the
explanation doesn't invoke an optimization process such as cognitive
design or evolutionary adaptation. (Or to be specific, to say that A is
naturally emergent from B is to say that given B, one does not need to
postulate further information, or settings of physical variables, deriving
from a cognitive or evolutionary optimization process, for A to result.)
Spirit isn't emergent, and isn't everywhere, and isn't a figment of the
imagination, and isn't supernatural. Spirit refers to a real thing,
with a real explanation; it's just that the explanation is very, very
difficult.
--
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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