Re: Does knowledge without reasoning useful


Curt Welch wrote:
"itenarent@xxxxxxxxxxxx" <itenarent@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
if we only represent knowledge but not reason with it, does knowlege
still useful or meaningful?

Before you can answer a question like that you have to figure out how you
want to define knowledge, and represent, and reason, and useful, and
meaningful.

If you look at alt.philosophy you might find that
a topic would take the form "What is x". What is
love. What is reason. And away you go yappity
yappity about the word.

My philosophy is to be pragmatic about the words
and how they are used in a particular situation.

With regards to AI, (which means some artificial
means to get a machine to behave in a way that
we would call "intelligent" if a human behaved
that way,) it means giving a mechanism that would
have those attributes, or at least one definition
of what those words might mean.


represent x: stand in the place of x

Thus something abstract like "number of sheep" can
be represented by "number of rocks". When the sheep
go out into the field we assign one rock per sheep.
When they return we match each of the rocks with
each sheep to see if indeed they are the same
number. We improved on the rock system with symbols
to represent numbers and rules on how to use them.

A representation of number with symbols in a computer
allows some dumb mechanism to process those numbers.

Finding a good representation is half the problem
solved in AI. How do we represent objects for the
computer to recognize or respond to?


knowledge of x:

Representation of x in a form that can be used to
reason about x.

reason: Using those representation to work things out.
This can be intuitive logic which makes use of everything
you know (have representations of) or formal logic where
you are only allowed to base your reasoning on the premises
in the question.


meaning:

How representations are related to each other. A new
input has no meaning unless it can be connected to
what is already there. We can remember nonsense by
giving it meaning (giving it connections), a mnemonic
technique used to remember say a random sequence of
numbers.

Inside a computer we get to decide what the patterns
represent or stand for. But in us how is this decided?

One way is the symbol is connected to its referent via
the sensory system. The other is that it is the unique
pattern of "symbol manipulations" that reflect the
relationship between the referents they represent.

It is the causual and inferential roles of symbols that
determine what they represent.

useful: Can be used to bring about some desired outcome.


--
JC

.

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