Re: The structure of a self-conscious mind

"Allan C Cybulskie" <allan.c.cybulskie@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> "Curt Welch" <curt@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:20050925005459.452$Rq@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

> Look, both types of talk can be misleading. I prefer mentalistic talk
> because it seems to capture our own experiences and makes internal events
> important, unlike behaviourism which attempts to eliminate them. For
> your work in AI, you really want to eliminate internal events because you
> have no way of ensuring that a computer has them.

Actually, just the opposite, I MUST understand, explain, and build, the
correct internal events into a machine in order to solve AI. It's all
about the internal events. If I don't correctly understand what's inside,
I have no hope of solving AI.

> But that doesn't mean
> that you give a computer a mind if you ignore internal events and build
> behaviour.

:) Ah, the old mind problem. :)

> > The only reason you think it's better is because you were conditioned
> > with operant conditioning to think that is better. Yes, you were
> > brainwashed into believing you acutally understand what your mind is
> > doing. This is the long standing problem about humans tring to talk
> > about the _cause_ of human behavior. They get it all wrong most the
> > time.
>
> But the problem is that the rejection of the operant conditioning theory
> is NOT because I think I know the source, but that the theory contradicts
> my personal experiences of mind. You cannot simply insist that I am
> brainwashed to believe something when my personal experiences seem to
> lead us to the conclusion that reasoning plays a part in learning and
> isn't conditioned.

Well, I can insist that you are branwashed. I just seem unable to prove it
to you. That is the problem of behaviorist. They understand how blind the
rest of the world is but no matter how hard they try to explain it, they
can't get through to many people. It's not just you that is
branwashed, it's our entire culture. Some people seem able to learn to see
past it, others can't.

> For example, I can learn to multiply by either a) memorizing
> multiplication tables (the conditioned way) or b) by learning HOW to
> multiply (the reasoned way). Since it looks like I can do both, it seems
> odd to insist that it's all conditioned, and your standard reply of
> "there's no evidence against it all being operant conditioning" seems
> quite hollow at this point.

I've taken a lot of time to try and explain it. But some people just can't
get it. You are not alone by any means. I know the confusion you are
feeling, just like I know the confusion my 3rd grader runs into when she is
given a problem beyond her ablity to understand. You have been so
conditioned in how to think about these things that you can't even see what
I'm talking about when I explain it slowly step by step. You just don't
have the correct foundation to see it yet. I don't know how to give you
the foundation.

> > The same thing goes for all our metalistic terms. We talk about having
> > "goals" which makes people think they must build "goals" into their
> > hardware. But in fact, the reason we talk about goals is not because
> > they allow us to understand what is happening in our brain, but because
> > it allows us to predict future human behavior.
>
> It's both. You cannot be said to understand how humans behave if you
> can't predict future behaviour in at least some general way. But if
> goals can allow us to predict future behviour, there must be an
> implementation in the brain that allows us to generate and react to
> goals. Your system is GOING to have goals in it in some way.

The problem is that you have no real understanding of what you are talking
about when you say "a system HAS goals". You don't seem to have the
foundation of understand needed to understand what I'm talking about here.

I've written many long articles about the ideas of "a system having goals"
here in c.a.p. just recently trying to help people see just what they are
in fact talking about, but that thread is not making any more progress than
this one.

> This was my reaction when people said that connectionism would eliminate
> beliefs and desires. IF we act according to beliefs and desires, THEN my
> beliefs and desires will be encoded into the connectionist theory and
> analysis of my brain ... and I'll be able to read them out from there.
> You cannot eliminate mentalism by hiding it in the implementation.

Well, yes, I agree with that. If I build it correctly, you must see
everything in the machine I build, that you also see in a human, or else I
built it wrong. But, to me, this means, "if it looks like a human to you,
it is a human", but to many people, and I suspect you are one as well, what
that means is that it must have the right stuff inside, or else it is not
human.

> > We don't need to build goals into our hardware. We need to build
> > hardware which exhibits goal-seeking behaviors. These are two very
> > different
> things
> > that far too many people have failed to grasp.
>
> I agree that some people take mentalistic terms too literally,

Well, then you are not totaly lost and maybe one day you will understand.

> but to
> ignore things like goals in the implementation is just as bad,

The fact is, when people talk about goals, they sound like they are talking
about something inside us, but in fact, they never are. They are only
using the langauge of goals to describe human behavior.

> and that's
> what behaviouristic talk leads to.

No, behaviorist talk makes it clear that we are talking about behavior when
we talk about behavior without pretending to be talking about something
inside us when we are not talking about something inside us.

To talk about behavior as if we were talking about something inside us only
brainwashes people into thinking that stuff is actually inside us.

> > > So explain to me how it is that I can understand without being able
> > > to automatically produce the appropriate behaviour, when the only way
> > > you can ever say -- even if in a totally bogus way, in my opinion --
> > > that a pigeon understands is if it can indeed automatically produce
> > > the appropriate behaviour. If you can't, then you have a bit of a
> > > problem
> if
> > > you want to go along with Glen and insist that that's all there is to
> > > "understanding" and "concepts". And if you try to work your way out
> > > of it by talking about different ways or methods working in different
> > > ways, then you have conceded all I care about ... since it's the
> > > functionality that I care about, and you'd be building those
> > > differences into your own theories.
> >
> > Right. If I build a machine that acts like a human, which you can say,
> "it
> > seems to understand because I can explain to it how to stack lumber and
> > then it spends the day doing it - expect for the few mistakes it made
> > but which it quickly corrected by focusing its attention on the work",
> > then I've done my job. So, it makes no difference how I talk about the
> > inner workings of my machine, as long as in the end, you see that it
> > understands concepts like humans do. I agree completely with you on
> > that.
>
> Well, let me get into a major issue here: Do you want an intelligent
> machine, or a machine with a mind?

Yeah, I thought you might try to go there.

> If you want an intelligent machine, I'd submit that we already have them.
> After all, we have computers that can easily and quickly calculate
> complex mathematical formula, something that would make a human a genius
> if it could do it. Now, if you want a computer with a mind, then I
> disagree that if you could build a machine that acts like a human, it
> would have a mind, since having a mind basically means having internal
> experience, and simply acting like a human doesn't prove that at all.

Yeah, I was right about you. You just don't get it and you are not alone.
You are part of a huge segment of society that are branwashed about this
yet they have no clue they are brainwashed - they insist that it's an
obvious fact they are not branwashed about it because you know for a fact
humans have goals inside them.

> If you want a self-motivating, intelligent machine, then that's okay as
> well. But it might not have a mind.

"mind" is just another one of those mentalistic terms which you have been
brainwashed into beliving you have inside you. You don't. Your mom just
told you you did and you belived her because we all believe our mother.
She also probably taught you all about those goals hidden inside you as
well and that warm heart you have inside you that makes you such a caring
person. Yeah, all that stuff is inside us and if I don't build it into my
machine, it will be a heartless, mindless machine with no goals and no
ability to care about anything.

Do you grasp at all how silly and pointless that type of talk is when it
comes to helping us know what to build in the machine to create AI?

As you pointed out before, behaviorism speak doesn't tell us what to build
into the machine either. It only tells us what the machine should do when
we build the right stuff into the machine. So, without someone telling us
how the brain works, what we are left doing is guessing at what we need to
build into the machine. But, after we guess, we can then test or guess, by
seeing if the machine we built produces the correct types of behavior as
formally and accurately defined by the langauge of behavorism. If it
doesn't have that behavior, we have built the wrong stuff inside the
machine, and we know to try something different.

If it matches the behavior, that doesn't mean we are done, because the
langauge of behaviorsm doesn't explain all human behavior. But it's
obvious that we can create many other behavior tests to see how we are
doing as well, like stacking lumber, and palying chess, and playing the
Turing game, etc.

But the problem here with mentalisms is that it causes people to try and
build things like "goals" into their hardware, and to totally ignore, our
real behavior. It causes poeple to go looking for the "memory hardware" in
the brain, instead of looking for the systems that explain our actual
behavior.

Now, I know how human behavior (like your lumber stacking in learning task)
can be explained in terms of operant conditioning. I tried to explain it
to you, but you don't buy it. Well, good luck if you ever try to solve AI.
That's all I can say. A lot of good time and energy has been wasted trying
to build things that don't exist. That's probably the number one
hinderence to progess in AI - the fact that people are brainwashed by their
culture into thinking they know more about what is inside us than they
really do.

--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@xxxxxxxx http://NewsReader.Com/
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: The structure of a self-conscious mind
    ... > about conditioning techniques and their use in controlling emotional ... you give to them are useful or correct (like goals, ... And I believe if you duplicate that type of reaction in a computer, ... >>> my personal experiences of mind. ...
    (comp.ai.philosophy)
  • Re: The structure of a self-conscious mind
    ... My point, in fact, was that in order to teach a pigeon ... >> prove that humans do not learn by operant conditioning. ... > give a computer a mind if you ignore internal events and build behaviour. ... the reason we talk about goals is not because ...
    (comp.ai.philosophy)
  • Why physicists should pay attention to the mind
    ... In this post I'll explain why physicists should pay attention to ... true in our mind by mere voluntary affirmation, ... about the goals and methods of science, and they showed unequivocally, ...
    (sci.physics.research)
  • Re: Misc comments on categorisation, problem solving, etc (Was Re: Aaron Somons....)
    ... structures that we commonly refer to as "goals and desires"? ... >> conditioning completely around on you. ... it relied on observing their behaviour and working with rewards for "right ...
    (sci.cognitive)
  • Re: The right time to quit, or pull a bet!
    ... > Timmy...changed my mind, I'll give you one more chance to convince me. ... threshold that would give me a good shot at a few goals reached per 3 ... players losing multi-pressed stacks, and seldom see those taken down. ...
    (rec.gambling.craps)