Re: Paper by ~MM on distributed self-awareness


Stephen Harris wrote:
http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~mm/self-awareness.pdf
by Melanie Mitchell (Hofstadter was her Phd. supervisor)



I had a chance to read the rest of the article now, and Melanie is
basically talking about modeling AI's as emergent dynamical systems ala
the application of the ideas of complexity theory. From pg 5 ....

============
However, the philosophy behind the programs can be summarized by the
following principles for modeling perception, which closely follow the
principles abstracted above.

(1) The perceptual process must be fine-grained, diverse, redundant,
and decentralized.

(2) Perception is guided by "fluid" concepts, which are themselves
shaped as the perceptual process unfolds.

(3) The perceptual process proceeds as an interplay of bottom-up modes
(driven by stimuli from the environment) and top-down modes (driven by
expectation, prior knowledge, biases, and what has already been
discovered). This interplay is not preprogrammed, but is an emergent
effect of the collective actions of low-level components of the system.

(4) The perceptual process shifts over time from being highly parallel,
random, and bottom-up, to being more focused, deterministic, and
top-down. As in (3), this shift is not pre-programmed, but rather is an
emergent effect of collective behavior in the system.

(5) The perceptual process must have a means of "self-watching"
monitoring its own state and progress that feeds back to affect
behavior.
==================

Compare this to complexity theory ideas that self-organization,
patterning, and phase shifts occur in systems that have: (a) many
simple interacting components, (b) nonlinearities, (c) positive and
negative feedback, and (d) continual energy flows which produce (e)
dissipative structures. Such systems have many self-organized operating
modes or attractor basins, multiple bifurcations at critical points
which make future behavior difficult to predict, and global [top level]
effects which feed back and down to constrain behavior of bottom-level
elements.

Compare #(4) especially to Prigogine's statement that ... "...
self-organization processes in far-from-equilibrium conditions
correspond to a delicate interplay between chance and necessity,
between fluctuations and deterministic laws ...".

Melanie is basically giving an example of how to apply this.

.