RE: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke ---- was ---- Building a machine that can learn from experience
Richard, Since you are clearly in the mode you routinely get into when you start loosing an argument on this list --- as has happened so many times before --- i.e., of ceasing all further productive communication on the actual subject of the argument --- this will be my last communication with you on this subject --- that is --- unless you actually come of up with some reasonable support for your brash statement that the central core of Tonini's paper, which I cited, was nonsense. I have better things to do than get into extended arguments with people who are as intellectually dishonest as you become when you start loosing an argument. Ed Porter -Original Message- From: Richard Loosemore [mailto:r...@lightlink.com] Sent: Friday, December 26, 2008 1:03 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: 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/?; 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] 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
===Colin said== The tacit assumption is that the model's thus implemented on a computer will/can 'behave' indistinguishably from the real thing, when what you are observing is a model of the real thing, not the real thing. ===ED's reply=== I was making no assumption that the model would be behave indistinquisably from the real thing, but instead only that there were meaningful --- and, from a cross-fertilization standpoint, informative --- levels of description at which the computer model and the corresponding brain behavior were similar. ===Colin said== There's a boundary to cross - when you claim to have access to human level intellect - then you are demanding a equivalence with a real human, not a model of a human. ===ED's reply=== When I, and presumably many other AGIers, say human-level AGI, we do not mean an exact functional replica of the human brain or mind. Rather we mean an AGI that can do things like speak and understand natural language, see and understand the meaning of its visual surroundings, reason from the rough equivalent of human-level world knowledge, have common sense, do creative problems solving, and other mental tasks --- substantially as well as most people. Its methods of computation do not have to be exactly like those used in the mind, the major issue is that its competencies be at least roughly as good over a range of talents. ===Colin said== I don't think there's any real issue here. Mostly semantics being mixed a bit. Gotta get back to xmas! Yuletide stuff to you. ===ED's reply=== Agreed. Ed Porter -Original Message- From: Colin Hales [mailto:c.ha...@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au] Sent: Tuesday, December 23, 2008 7:55 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke was Building a machine that can learn from experience Ed, Comments interspersed below: Ed Porter wrote: Colin, Here are my comments re the following parts of your below post: ===Colin said== I merely point out that there are fundamental limits as to how computer science (CS) can inform/validate basic/physical science - (in an AGI context, brain science). Take the Baars/Franklin IDA project.. It predicts nothing neuroscience can poke a stick at. ===ED's reply=== Different AGI models can have different degrees of correspondence to, and different explanatory relevance to, what is believed to take place in the brain. For example the Thomas Serre's PhD thesis Learning a Dictionary of Shape-Components in Visual Cortex: Comparison with Neurons, Humans and Machines, at from http://cbcl.mit.edu/projects/cbcl/publications/ps/MIT-CSAIL-TR-2006-028.pdf http://cbcl.mit.edu/projects/cbcl/publications/ps/MIT-CSAIL-TR-2006-028.pdf , is a computer simulation which is rather similar to my concept of how a Novamente-like AGI could perform certain tasks in visual perception, and yet it is designed to model the human visual system to a considerable degree. It shows that a certain model of how Serre and Poggio think a certain aspect of the human brain works, does in fact work surprisingly well when simulated in a computer. A surprisingly large number of brain science papers are based on computer simulations, many of which are substantially simplified models, but they do given neuroscientists a way to poke a stick at various theories they might have for how the brain operates at various levels of organization. Some of these papers are directly relevant to AGI. And some AGI papers are directly relevant to providing answers to certain brain science questions. You are quite right! Realistic models can be quite informative and feed back - suggesting new empirical approaches. There can be great cross-fertilisation. However the point is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. The phrase does in fact work surprisingly well when simulated in a computer illustrates the confusion. 'work'? according to whom? surprisingly well? by what criteria? The tacit assumption is that the model's thus implemented on a computer will/can 'behave' indistinguishably from the real thing, when what you are observing is a model of the real thing, not the real thing. HERE If you targeting AGI with a benchmark/target of human intellect or problem solving skills, then the claim made on any/all models is that models can attain that goal. A computer implements a model. To make a claim that a model completely captures the reality upon which it was based, you need to have a solid theory of the relationships between models and reality that is not wishful thinking or assumption, but solid science. Here's where you run into the problematic issue that basic physical sciences have with models. There's a boundary to cross - when you claim to have access to human level intellect - then you are demanding a equivalence with a real human, not a model of a human. ===Colin said== I agree with your : At the other end of things,
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:
Re: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke ---- was ---- Building a machine that can learn from experience
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 On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 9:53 AM, Richard Loosemore r...@lightlink.comwrote: 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
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
I mentioned it because looked at the book again recently and was pleasantly surprised at how well his ideas seemed to have held up In other words, although there are point on which I think he's probably wrong, his decade-old ideas *still* seem more sensible and insightful than most of the theoretical speculations one reads in the neuroscience literature... and I can't really think of any recent neuroscience data that refutes any of his key hypotheses... On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 10:36 AM, Richard Loosemore r...@lightlink.comwrote: 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.commailto: 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
RE: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke ---- was ---- Building a machine that can learn from experience
Colin, Here are my comments re the following parts of your below post: ===Colin said== I merely point out that there are fundamental limits as to how computer science (CS) can inform/validate basic/physical science - (in an AGI context, brain science). Take the Baars/Franklin IDA project.. It predicts nothing neuroscience can poke a stick at. ===ED's reply=== Different AGI models can have different degrees of correspondence to, and different explanatory relevance to, what is believed to take place in the brain. For example the Thomas Serre's PhD thesis Learning a Dictionary of Shape-Components in Visual Cortex: Comparison with Neurons, Humans and Machines, at from http://cbcl.mit.edu/projects/cbcl/publications/ps/MIT-CSAIL-TR-2006-028.pdf http://cbcl.mit.edu/projects/cbcl/publications/ps/MIT-CSAIL-TR-2006-028.pdf , is a computer simulation which is rather similar to my concept of how a Novamente-like AGI could perform certain tasks in visual perception, and yet it is designed to model the human visual system to a considerable degree. It shows that a certain model of how Serre and Poggio think a certain aspect of the human brain works, does in fact work surprisingly well when simulated in a computer. A surprisingly large number of brain science papers are based on computer simulations, many of which are substantially simplified models, but they do given neuroscientists a way to poke a stick at various theories they might have for how the brain operates at various levels of organization. Some of these papers are directly relevant to AGI. And some AGI papers are directly relevant to providing answers to certain brain science questions. ===Colin said== I agree with your : At the other end of things, physicists are increasingly viewing physical reality as a computation, and thus the science of computation (and communication which is a part of it), such as information theory, have begun to play an increasingly important role in the most basic of all sciences. ===ED's reply=== We are largely on the same page here ===Colin said== I disagree with: But the brain is not part of an eternal verity. It is the result of the engineering of evolution. Unless I've missed something ... The natural evolutionary 'engineering' that has been going on has not been the creation of a MODEL (aboutness) of things - the 'engineering' has evolved the construction of the actual things. The two are not the same. The brain is indeed 'part of an eternal verity' - it is made of natural components operating in a fashion we attempt to model as 'laws of nature',,, ===ED's reply=== If you define engineering as a process that involves designing something in the abstract --- i.e., in your a MODEL (aboutness of things) --- before physically building it, you could claim evolution is not engineering. But if you define engineering as the designing of things (by a process that has intelligence what ever method) to solve a set of problems or constraints, evolution does perform engineering, and the brain was formed by such engineering. How can you claim the human brain is an eternal verity, since it is only believed that it has existing in anything close to its current form in the last 30 to 100 thousand years, and there is no guarantee how much longer it will continue to exists. Compared to much of what the natural sciences study, its existence appears quite fleeting. ===Colin said== Anyway, for these reasons, folks who use computer models to study human brains/consciousness will encounter some difficulty justifying, to the basic physical sciences, claims made as to the equivalence of the model and reality. That difficulty is fundamental and cannot be 'believed away'. ===ED's reply=== If you attend brain science lectures and read brain science literature, you will find that computer modeling is playing an ever increasing role in brain science --- so this basic difficulty that you describe largely does not exist. ===Colin said== The intelligence originates in the brain. AGI and brain science must be literally joined at the hip or the AGI enterprise is arguably scientifically impoverished wishful thinking. ===ED's reply=== I don't know what you mean by joined at the hip, but I think it is being overly anthropomorphic to think an artificial mind has to slavishly model a human brain to have great power and worth. But I do think it would probably have to accomplish some of the same general functions, such as automatic pattern learning, credit assignment, attention control, etc. Ed Porter -Original Message- From: Colin Hales [mailto:c.ha...@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au] Sent: Monday, December 22, 2008 11:36 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke was Building a machine that can learn from experience Ed, I wasn't trying to justify or promote a 'divide'. The two worlds must be
RE: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke ---- was ---- Building a machine that can learn from experience
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 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
Re: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke ---- was ---- Building a machine that can learn from experience
Ed, Comments interspersed below: Ed Porter wrote: Colin, Here are my comments re the following parts of your below post: ===Colin said== I merely point out that there are fundamental limits as to how computer science (CS) can inform/validate basic/physical science - (in an AGI context, brain science). Take the Baars/Franklin IDA project It predicts nothing neuroscience can poke a stick at... ===ED's reply=== Different AGI models can have different degrees of correspondence to, and different explanatory relevance to, what is believed to take place in the brain. For example the Thomas Serre's PhD thesis Learning a Dictionary of Shape-Components in Visual Cortex: Comparison with Neurons, Humans and Machines, at from http://cbcl.mit.edu/projects/cbcl/publications/ps/MIT-CSAIL-TR-2006-028.pdf , is a computer simulation which is rather similar to my concept of how a Novamente-like AGI could perform certain tasks in visual perception, and yet it is designed to model the human visual system to a considerable degree. It shows that a certain model of how Serre and Poggio think a certain aspect of the human brain works, does in fact work surprisingly well when simulated in a computer. A surprisingly large number of brain science papers are based on computer simulations, many of which are substantially simplified models, but they do given neuroscientists a way to poke a stick at various theories they might have for how the brain operates at various levels of organization. Some of these papers are directly relevant to AGI. And some AGI papers are directly relevant to providing answers to certain brain science questions. You are quite right! Realistic models can be quite informative and feed back - suggesting new empirical approaches. There can be great cross-fertilisation. However the point is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. The phrase does in fact work surprisingly well when simulated in a computer illustrates the confusion. 'work'? according to whom? surprisingly well? by what criteria? The tacit assumption is that the model's thus implemented on a computer will/can 'behave' indistinguishably from the real thing, when what you are observing is a model of the real thing, not the real thing. *HERE *If you targeting AGI with a benchmark/target of human intellect or problem solving skills, then the claim made on any/all models is that models can attain that goal. A computer implements a model. To make a claim that a model completely captures the reality upon which it was based, you need to have a solid theory of the relationships between models and reality that is not wishful thinking or assumption, but solid science. Here's where you run into the problematic issue that basic physical sciences have with models. There's a boundary to cross - when you claim to have access to human level intellect - then you are demanding a equivalence with a real human, not a model of a human. ===Colin said== I agree with your : /At the other end of things, physicists are increasingly viewing physical reality as a computation, and thus the science of computation (and communication which is a part of it), such as information theory, have begun to play an increasingly important role in the most basic of all sciences./ ===ED's reply=== We are largely on the same page here ===Colin said== I disagree with: But the brain is not part of an eternal verity. It is the result of the engineering of evolution. Unless I've missed something ... The natural evolutionary 'engineering' that has been going on has /not/ been the creation of a MODEL (aboutness) of things - the 'engineering' has evolved the construction of the /actual/ things. The two are not the same. The brain is indeed 'part of an eternal verity' - it is made of natural components operating in a fashion we attempt to model as 'laws of nature',,, ===ED's reply=== If you define engineering as a process that involves designing something in the abstract --- i.e., in your a MODEL (aboutness of things) --- before physically building it, you could claim evolution is not engineering. But if you define engineering as the designing of things (by a process that has intelligence what ever method) to solve a set of problems or constraints, evolution does perform engineering, and the brain was formed by such engineering. How can you claim the human brain is an eternal verity, since it is only believed that it has existing in anything close to its current form in the last 30 to 100 thousand years, and there is no guarantee how much longer it will continue to exists. Compared to much of what the natural sciences study, its existence appears quite fleeting. I think this is just a terminology issue. The 'laws of nature' are the eternal verity, to me. The dynamical output they represent - of course that does whatever it does. The
Re: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke ---- was ---- Building a machine that can learn from experience
Criticizing AGI for not being neuroscience, and criticizing AGI programs for not trying to precisely emulate humans, is really a bit silly. One can of course make and test scientific hypotheses about the behavior of AGI systems, quite independent of their potential relationship to human beings. AGI systems ultimately are physical systems, and not necessarily less scientifically interesting than human physical systems. -- Ben G On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 7:54 PM, Colin Hales c.ha...@pgrad.unimelb.edu.auwrote: Ed, Comments interspersed below: Ed Porter wrote: Colin, Here are my comments re the following parts of your below post: ===Colin said== I merely point out that there are fundamental limits as to how computer science (CS) can inform/validate basic/physical science - (in an AGI context, brain science). Take the Baars/Franklin IDA project…. It predicts nothing neuroscience can poke a stick at… ===ED's reply=== Different AGI models can have different degrees of correspondence to, and different explanatory relevance to, what is believed to take place in the brain. For example the Thomas Serre's PhD thesis Learning a Dictionary of Shape-Components in Visual Cortex: Comparison with Neurons, Humans and Machines, at from http://cbcl.mit.edu/projects/cbcl/publications/ps/MIT-CSAIL-TR-2006-028.pdf, is a computer simulation which is rather similar to my concept of how a Novamente-like AGI could perform certain tasks in visual perception, and yet it is designed to model the human visual system to a considerable degree. It shows that a certain model of how Serre and Poggio think a certain aspect of the human brain works, does in fact work surprisingly well when simulated in a computer. A surprisingly large number of brain science papers are based on computer simulations, many of which are substantially simplified models, but they do given neuroscientists a way to poke a stick at various theories they might have for how the brain operates at various levels of organization. Some of these papers are directly relevant to AGI. And some AGI papers are directly relevant to providing answers to certain brain science questions. You are quite right! Realistic models can be quite informative and feed back - suggesting new empirical approaches. There can be great cross-fertilisation. However the point is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. The phrase does in fact work surprisingly well when simulated in a computer illustrates the confusion. 'work'? according to whom? surprisingly well? by what criteria? The tacit assumption is that the model's thus implemented on a computer will/can 'behave' indistinguishably from the real thing, when what you are observing is a model of the real thing, not the real thing. *HERE *If you targeting AGI with a benchmark/target of human intellect or problem solving skills, then the claim made on any/all models is that models can attain that goal. A computer implements a model. To make a claim that a model completely captures the reality upon which it was based, you need to have a solid theory of the relationships between models and reality that is not wishful thinking or assumption, but solid science. Here's where you run into the problematic issue that basic physical sciences have with models. There's a boundary to cross - when you claim to have access to human level intellect - then you are demanding a equivalence with a real human, not a model of a human. ===Colin said== I agree with your : *At the other end of things, physicists are increasingly viewing physical reality as a computation, and thus the science of computation (and communication which is a part of it), such as information theory, have begun to play an increasingly important role in the most basic of all sciences.* ===ED's reply=== We are largely on the same page here ===Colin said== I disagree with: But the brain is not part of an eternal verity. It is the result of the engineering of evolution. Unless I've missed something ... The natural evolutionary 'engineering' that has been going on has *not* been the creation of a MODEL (aboutness) of things - the 'engineering' has evolved the construction of the *actual*things. The two are not the same. The brain is indeed 'part of an eternal verity' - it is made of natural components operating in a fashion we attempt to model as 'laws of nature',,, ===ED's reply=== If you define engineering as a process that involves designing something in the abstract --- i.e., in your a MODEL (aboutness of things) --- before physically building it, you could claim evolution is not engineering. But if you define engineering as the designing of things (by a process that has intelligence what ever method) to solve a set of problems or constraints, evolution does perform engineering, and the brain was formed by such engineering. How can you
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] SyNAPSE might not be a joke ---- was ---- Building a machine that can learn from experience
Hi, So if the researcher on this project have been learning some of your ideas, and some of the better speculative thinking and neural simulations that have been done in brains science --- either directly or indirectly --- it might be incorrect to say that there is no 'design for a thinking machine' in SyNAPSE. But perhaps you know the thinking of the researchers involved enough to know that they do, in fact, lack such a design, other than what they have yet to learn by progress yet to be made by their neural simulations. Well I talked to Dharmendra on this topic a couple months ago. Believe me, there is no grand AI architecture there. You won't find one in their publications, and they don't allude to one in their conversations. You'd have to be a heck of a conspiracy theorist to posit one... I agree that one could make a neural-net-like design based on the underlying conceptual principles of OpenCogPrime, and if I had a lot more free time maybe I'd do it, but I'm more interested in putting my time into the current design which IMO is better adapted to current computers. I have a feeling the neuroscientists have a lot of surprises for us coming up in the next 2 decades, so that it's premature to base AI designs on neuroscience knowledge... ANYWAY, I THINK WE SHOULD, AT LEAST, INVITE THEM TO AGI 2009. I though one of the goal of AGI 2009 it to increase the attention and respect our movement receives from the AI community in general and AI funders in particular. Please note that the AI community and the artificial brain / brain simulation community are rather separate at this point (though not entirely so). We will have a number of recognized leaders from the AI field at AGI-09, such as (to pick a few almost at random) John Laird, Marcus Hutter and Juergen Schmidhuber However, in spite of emailing and talking to some relevant folks, I didn't seem to succeed in pulling brain simulation folks into AGI-09, at least they didn't submit papers for presentation... Perhaps for AGI-10 or 11 some different strategy will need to be taken if we wish to help pull these communities together. For instance, convince *one* leader in that area to take charge of pulling his colleagues into a special session on computational neuroscience modeling etc. At the AAAI BICA symposium Alexei Samsonovich organized last month, a couple neuroscience simulation guys (Steve Grossberg for example) showed up alongside the AI guys ... probably because biology was in the title ;-) ... but still it was strongly AI-focused rather than brain-simulation focused. -- Ben G --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=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
Richard, Please describe some of the counterexamples, that you can easily come up with, that make a mockery of Tononi's conclusion. Ed Porter -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/?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
On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 11:05 AM, Ed Porter ewpor...@msn.com wrote: Ben, Thanks for the reply. It is a shame the brain science people aren't more interested in AGI. It seems to me there is a lot of potential for cross-fertilization. I don't think many of these folks have a principled or deep-seated **aversion** to AGI work or anything like that -- it's just that they're busy people and need to prioritize, like all working scientists Similarly, not many AGI types show up at computational neuroscience modeling type conferences To create connections between fields there has to be some strong indication of real value offered by one field to the other ... and preferably mutual value... But of course, the catch is that this value will only be demonstrated once the researchers in the different fields actually start coming together more I was involved w/ trying to build these kinds of links in the late 90s when I co-founded two cross-disciplinary university cog sci degree programs. It's hard because different people from different fields speak different languages and have different ideas of what constitutes successful or interesting research. The problem of bringing together AI and neuroscience and psychology was *partially* solved back when by the creation of cog sci as a discipline ... but obviously the solution was only partial because cog sci to a disturbing degree got sucked into cog psych, and now someone needs to work again to pull AGI and brain-sim work together. Obviously, there's only so much one maverick outsider researcher like me can do to help nudge these two research communities together, but I'll do what I can via the AGI conferences, anyways ben g --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=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
Colin, From a quick read, the gist of what your are saying seems to be that AGI is just engineering, i.e., the study of what man can make and the properties thereof, whereas science relates to the eternal verities of reality. But the brain is not part of an eternal verity. It is the result of the engineering of evolution. At the other end of things, physicists are increasingly viewing physical reality as a computation, and thus the science of computation (and communication which is a part of it), such as information theory, have begun to play an increasingly important role in the most basic of all sciences. And to the extent that the study of the human mind is a science, then the study of the types of computation that are done in the mind is part of that science, and AGI is the study of many of the same functions. So your post might explain the reason for a current cultural divide, but it does not really provide a justification for it. In addition, if you attend events at either MIT's brain study center or its AI center, you will find many of the people who are there are from the other of these two centers, and that there is a considerable degree of cross-fertilization there that I have heard people at such event describe the benefits of. Ed Porter -Original Message- From: Colin Hales [mailto:c.ha...@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au] Sent: Monday, December 22, 2008 6:19 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke was Building a machine that can learn from experience Ben Goertzel wrote: On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 11:05 AM, Ed Porter ewpor...@msn.com wrote: Ben, Thanks for the reply. It is a shame the brain science people aren't more interested in AGI. It seems to me there is a lot of potential for cross-fertilization. I don't think many of these folks have a principled or deep-seated **aversion** to AGI work or anything like that -- it's just that they're busy people and need to prioritize, like all working scientists There's a more fundamental reason: Software engineering is not 'science' in the sense understood in the basic physical sciences. Science works to acquire models of empirically provable critical dependencies (apparent causal necessities). Software engineering never delivers this. The result of the work, however interesting and powerful, is a model that is, at best, merely a correlate of some a-priori 'designed' behaviour. Testing to your own specification is a normal behaviour in computer science. This is not the testing done in the basic physical science - they 'test' (empirically examine) whatever is naturally there - which is, by definition, a-priori unknown. No matter how interesting it may be, software tells us nothing about the actual causal dependencies. The computer's physical hardware (semiconductor charge manipulation), configured as per the software, is the actual and ultimate causal necessitator of all the natural behaviour of hot rocks inside your computer. Software is MANY:1 redundantly/degenerately related to the physical (natural world) outcomes. The brilliantly useful 'hardware-independence' achieved by software engineering and essentially analogue electrical machines behaving 'as-if' they were digital - so powerful and elegant - actually places the status of the software activities outside the realm of any claims as causal. This is the fundamental problem that the basic physical sciences have with computer 'science'. It's not, in a formal sense a 'science'. That doesn't mean CS is bad or irrelevant - it just means that it's value as a revealer of the properties of the natural world must be accepted with appropriate caution. I've spent 10's of thousands of hours testing software that drove all manner of physical world equipment - some of it the size of a 10 storey building. I was testing to my own/others specification. Throughout all of it I knew I was not doing science in the sense that scientists know it to be. The mantra is correlation is not causation and it's beaten into scientist pups from an early age. Software is a correlate only - it 'causes' nothing. In critical argument revolving around claims in respect of software as causality - it would be defeated in review every time. A scientist, standing there with an algorithm/model of a natural world behaviour, knows that the model does not cause the behaviour. However, the scientist's model represents a route to predictive efficacy in respect of a unique natural phenomenon. Computer software does not predict the causal origination of the natural world behaviours driven by it. 10 compilers could produce 10 different causalities on the same computer. 10 different computers running the same software would produce 10 different lots of causality. That's my take on why the basic physical sciences may be under-motivated to use AGI as a route to the outcomes demanded of their field of interest = 'Laws/regularities of Nature'. It may
Re: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke ---- was ---- Building a machine that can learn from experience
Ed,
I wasn't trying to justify or promote a 'divide'. The two worlds must be
better off in collaboration, surely? I merely point out that there are
fundamental limits as to how computer science (CS) can inform/validate
basic/physical science - (in an AGI context, brain science). Take the
Baars/Franklin IDA project. Baars invents 'Global Workspace' = a
metaphor of apparent brain operation. Franklin writes one. Afterwards,
you're standing next to to it, wondering as to its performance. What
part of its behaviour has any direct bearing on how a brain works? It
predicts nothing neuroscience can poke a stick at. All you can say is
that the computer is manipulating abstractions according to a model of
brain material. At best you get to be quite right and prove nothing. If
the beastie also underperforms then you have seeds for doubt that also
prove nothing.
CS as 'science' has always had this problem. AGI merely inherits its
implications in a particular context/speciality. There's nothing bad or
good - merely justified limits as to how CS and AGI may interact via
brain science.
I agree with your :
/At the other end of things, physicists are increasingly viewing
physical reality as a computation, and thus the science of computation
(and communication which is a part of it), such as information theory,
have begun to play an increasingly important role in the most basic of
all sciences./
I would advocate physical reality (all of it) as /literally /computation
in the sense of information processing. Hold a pencil up in front of
your face and take a look at it... realise that the universe is
'computing a pencil'. Take a look at the computer in front of you: the
universe is 'computing a computer'. The universe is literally computing
YOU, too. The computation is not 'about' a pencil, a computer, a human.
The computation IS those things. In exactly this same sense I want the
universe to 'compute' an AGI (inorganic general intelligence). To me,
then, this is /not/ manipulating abstractions ('aboutnesses') - which is
the sense meant by CS generally and what actually happens in reality in CS.
So despite some agreement as to words - it is in the details we are
likely to differ. The information processing in the natural world is not
that which is going on in a model of it. As Edelman said(1) /A theory
to account for a hurricane is not a hurricane/. In exactly this way a
computational-algorithmic process about intelligence cannot a-priori
be claimed to be the intelligence of that which was modelled. Or - put
yet another way: That {THING behaves 'abstract- RULE-ly'} does not
entail that {anything manipulated according to abstract-RULE will become
THING}. The only perfect algorithmic (100% complete information content)
description of a thing is the actual thing, which includes all
'information' at all hierarchical descriptive levels, simultaneously.
I disagree with:
But the brain is not part of an eternal verity. It is the result of
the engineering of evolution.
Unless I've missed something ... The natural evolutionary 'engineering'
that has been going on has /not/ been the creation of a MODEL
(aboutness) of things - the 'engineering' has evolved the construction
of the /actual/ things. The two are not the same. The brain is indeed
'part of an eternal verity' - it is made of natural components operating
in a fashion we attempt to model as 'laws of nature'. Those models,
abstracted and shoehorned into a computer - are not the same as the
original. To believe that they are is one of those Occam's Razor
violations I pointed out before my xmas shopping spree (see previous-1
post).
---
Anyway, for these reasons, folks who use computer models to study human
brains/consciousness will encounter some difficulty justifying, to the
basic physical sciences, claims made as to the equivalence of the model
and reality. That difficulty is fundamental and cannot be 'believed
away'. At the same time it's not a show-stopper; merely something to be
aware of as we go about our duties. This will remain an issue - the only
real, certain, known example of a general intelligence is the human. The
intelligence originates in the brain. AGI and brain science must be
literally joined at the hip or the AGI enterprise is arguably
scientifically impoverished wishful thinking. Which is pretty much what
Ben said...although as usual I have used too many damned words!
I expect we'll just have to agree to disagree... but there you have it :-)
colin hales
(1) Edelman, G. (2003). Naturalizing consciousness: A theoretical
framework. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 100(9), 5520--24.
Ed Porter wrote:
Colin,
From a quick read, the gist of what your are saying seems to be that
AGI is just engineering, i.e., the study of what man can make and
the properties thereof, whereas science relates to the eternal
verities of reality.
Re: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke ---- was ---- Building a machine that can learn from experience
To add to this discussion, I'd like to point out that many AI systems have
been used and scientifically evaluated as *psychological* models, e.g.
cognitive models.
For instance, SOAR and ACT-R are among the many systems that have been used
and evaluated this way.
The goal of that sort of research is to come up with simple, principled
explanations of human behaviors in psychology experiments, via coming up
with software systems that precisely simulate these behaviors.
So, one possible approach to AGI would be via cognitive modeling of this
sort.
This is quite different than brain simulation, and also quite different than
AGI which seeks generally but not precisely humanlike behavior.
I know there is some divergence in the SOAR community between whose who want
to use SOAR for scientific cognitive modeling, and those who want to use it
for building AGI that emulates human thought qualitatively but not precisely
-- Ben G
On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 11:36 PM, Colin Hales
c.ha...@pgrad.unimelb.edu.auwrote:
Ed,
I wasn't trying to justify or promote a 'divide'. The two worlds must be
better off in collaboration, surely? I merely point out that there are
fundamental limits as to how computer science (CS) can inform/validate
basic/physical science - (in an AGI context, brain science). Take the
Baars/Franklin IDA project. Baars invents 'Global Workspace' = a metaphor
of apparent brain operation. Franklin writes one. Afterwards, you're
standing next to to it, wondering as to its performance. What part of its
behaviour has any direct bearing on how a brain works? It predicts nothing
neuroscience can poke a stick at. All you can say is that the computer is
manipulating abstractions according to a model of brain material. At best
you get to be quite right and prove nothing. If the beastie also
underperforms then you have seeds for doubt that also prove nothing.
CS as 'science' has always had this problem. AGI merely inherits its
implications in a particular context/speciality. There's nothing bad or good
- merely justified limits as to how CS and AGI may interact via brain
science.
I agree with your :
*At the other end of things, physicists are increasingly viewing physical
reality as a computation, and thus the science of computation (and
communication which is a part of it), such as information theory, have begun
to play an increasingly important role in the most basic of all sciences.*
I would advocate physical reality (all of it) as *literally *computation
in the sense of information processing. Hold a pencil up in front of your
face and take a look at it... realise that the universe is 'computing a
pencil'. Take a look at the computer in front of you: the universe is
'computing a computer'. The universe is literally computing YOU, too. The
computation is not 'about' a pencil, a computer, a human. The computation IS
those things. In exactly this same sense I want the universe to 'compute' an
AGI (inorganic general intelligence). To me, then, this is *not*manipulating
abstractions ('aboutnesses') - which is the sense meant by CS
generally and what actually happens in reality in CS.
So despite some agreement as to words - it is in the details we are likely
to differ. The information processing in the natural world is not that which
is going on in a model of it. As Edelman said(1) *A theory to account for
a hurricane is not a hurricane*. In exactly this way a
computational-algorithmic process about intelligence cannot a-priori be
claimed to be the intelligence of that which was modelled. Or - put yet
another way: That {THING behaves 'abstract- RULE-ly'} does not entail that
{anything manipulated according to abstract-RULE will become THING}. The
only perfect algorithmic (100% complete information content) description of
a thing is the actual thing, which includes all 'information' at all
hierarchical descriptive levels, simultaneously.
I disagree with:
But the brain is not part of an eternal verity. It is the result of the
engineering of evolution.
Unless I've missed something ... The natural evolutionary 'engineering'
that has been going on has *not* been the creation of a MODEL (aboutness)
of things - the 'engineering' has evolved the construction of the
*actual*things. The two are not the same. The brain is indeed 'part of an
eternal
verity' - it is made of natural components operating in a fashion we attempt
to model as 'laws of nature'. Those models, abstracted and shoehorned into a
computer - are not the same as the original. To believe that they are is one
of those Occam's Razor violations I pointed out before my xmas shopping
spree (see previous-1 post).
---
Anyway, for these reasons, folks who use computer models to study human
brains/consciousness will encounter some difficulty justifying, to the basic
physical sciences, claims made as to the equivalence of the model
Re: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke ---- was ---- Building a machine that can learn from experience
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. It's more like interesting brain simulation research that could eventually play a role in some future thinking-machine-building project, whose nature remains largely unspecified. Getting into the nitty-gritty a little more: until we understand way, way more about how brain dynamics and structures lead to thoughts, and/or have way, way better brain imaging data, we're not going to be able to build a thinking machine via brain simulation. -- Ben G On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 5:25 PM, Ed Porter ewpor...@msn.com 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. However, it is not clear to me --- from reading this paper or one full chapter of A Universe of Consciousness on Google Books and spending about fifteen minutes skimming the rest of it --- that either he or Edelman have anything approaching Novamente or OpenCog's detail description of how to build an AGI. I did not hear enough discussion of the role of grounding, and the need for proper selection in the spreading activation of a representational net so that the consciousness would be one of awareness of appropriate meaning. But Tononi is going to work with Dharmendra Modha of IBM, who is a leader in brain simulation, so they may well produce something interesting. I personally think it would be more productive to spend the money with a more Novamente-like approach, where we already seem to have good ideas for how to solve most of the hard problems (other than staying within a computational budget, and parameter tuning) --- but whatever it discovers should, at least, be relevant. Furthermore, what little I have read about the hardware side of this project is very exciting, since it provides a much more brain like platform, which if it could be made to work using Memsistors, or grapheme based technology, could enable artificial brains to be made for amazingly low prices, with energy costs 1/1000 to 1/30,000 that of CMOS machines with similar computational power. Its goal is to develop a technology that will enable AGIs to be built small enough that we could carry them around like an iPhone (albeit with large batteries, at least for a decade or so). In any case, I think we
Re: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke ---- was ---- Building a machine that can learn from experience
2008/12/21 Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org: However, IMO the rhetoric associating it with thinking machine building is premature and borderline dishonest. It's marketing rhetoric. It's more like interesting brain simulation research that could eventually play a role in some future thinking-machine-building project, whose nature remains largely unspecified. Yes, which would sound less dramatic. Some time ago there was a similar borderline dishonest report that a mouse brain had been simulated on a supercomputer. This sounded exciting, but it just turns out that they've been able to simulate a number of neuron-like elements (the Izhikevich spiking model, I think) similar in quantity to a mouse-sized brain within some tractable amount of time, which is not quite as impressive. This kind of research is eventually doomed to succeed, but at present we still don't know in detail how even a mouse brain is organized, beyond a fairly gross level of anatomy. Some of the newer techniques, such as genetic modification which gives each neuron a unique colour, should be helpful in this regard. --- 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
Ben, It would seem to me that a lot of the ideas in OpenCogPrime could be implemented in neuromorphic hardware, particularly if you were to intermix it with some traditional computing hardware. This is particularly true if such a system could efficiently use neural assemblies, because that would appear to allow it to much more flexibly allocate representational resources in given amount of neuromophic hardware. (This is one of he reasons I have asked so many questions about neural assemblies on this list.) So if the researcher on this project have been learning some of your ideas, and some of the better speculative thinking and neural simulations that have been done in brains science --- either directly or indirectly --- it might be incorrect to say that there is no 'design for a thinking machine' in SyNAPSE. But perhaps you know the thinking of the researchers involved enough to know that they do, in fact, lack such a design, other than what they have yet to learn by progress yet to be made by their neural simulations. (It should be noted that neuromophic hardware might be able to greatly reduce the cost of, and speed up, many types of neural simulations, increasing the rate at which they may be able to make progress with such an approach.) ANYWAY, I THINK WE SHOULD, AT LEAST, INVITE THEM TO AGI 2009. I though one of the goal of AGI 2009 it to increase the attention and respect our movement receives from the AI community in general and AI funders in particular. Ed Porter -Original Message- From: Ben Goertzel [mailto:b...@goertzel.org] Sent: Sunday, December 21, 2008 12:17 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke was Building a machine that can learn from experience 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. It's more like interesting brain simulation research that could eventually play a role in some future thinking-machine-building project, whose nature remains largely unspecified. Getting into the nitty-gritty a little more: until we understand way, way more about how brain dynamics and structures lead to thoughts, and/or have way, way better brain imaging data, we're not going to be able to build a thinking machine via brain simulation. -- Ben G On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 5:25 PM, Ed Porter ewpor...@msn.com 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
