Re: A request for information please.

On 17 May, 22:16, Stephen Harris <cyberguard-1...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Sergio Navega used to be a regular contributor to c.a.p. In this
paper he makes the point that the person who combines education
or reading along with practical experience is going to produce a
foundation for a deeper philosophical perspective than a person
who lacks such experience. He relates this to how an AI "ought"
to function.

http://www.intelliwise.com/reports/paper1.htm

"Later in this paper I will present some speculations on a
different point of view: that knowledge representation and
inference should be almost indistinguishable from one another
and the intelligence that a system presents is the result of
a _simultaneous_ _growth_ in its capacity to _represent_ and
_reason_. This approach seems to indicate the direction of
connectionist systems, in which this integration is achieved
naturally. In fact, several connectionists see no other way
of obtaining intelligence by other mechanisms. However, I
will suggest that it is possible to find non-connectionist
mechanisms that exhibit similar behavior, with the added
benefit of being more "economic" in terms of hardware
requirements(1). ... Thus, it seems unreasonable to ascribe
our distinguished intelligence just to better perceptual
capacity. But the fact is that we are more intelligent than
any other animal. There is, certainly, something more. What is
it? Is it language?
Could language explain our intelligence?

I wish I'd take my camera this morning, cos theres a
storm brewing, coming in over the hills. That kind of
light you get where the green trees kinda vibrate and
twinkle, the yellow in them contrast against the deep
blue violet of the cloud. It'll always be windy at certain
times in the moons phases, and the sea birds will come
in from the coast, etc.

Now if I were to talk of atmospheric pressure and took
barometer readings, did a stats chart instead, I may well
conclude, that for some unknown yet-to-be established
purpose or reason, theres always going to be more gulls
inland on a certain day. What would be wrong would be my
saying that when I draw up a chart, my very act of
performing the calculations and drawing the chart DOES
bring the gulls inland. In much the same way, how could it
be possible to invoke some kinda consciousness into any
artificial construction? and for what purposes?

A chart and plan or design can't do other things,
it can't frinstance tell you that air pressure alone unequivocally
caused a headache, it can't tell you it has a headache, as
you would be blameless of causing a headache in the cloud
because you drew a graph.
You can go through all the senses, and conclude the same.

what you can do is make an inference, jog somebody's
memory in one area of your sensory experience to jog another
to conclude, in some small error, that a particular action,scene,
value etc has been causal, but you have to judge if the 'error'
margin can be taken as factual, as realism?

So I take my photograph, I tweek the composition and put it
online, then someone tells me they like it but they can't
live with it! something to do with "making my room feel and
look like a dump'n'tip and gives me a strange desire to take
an asprin, and put up an umbrella after locking all the windows!!" :)
more usually it'd be "I don't know why, but it makes me feel
like....its weird"

If language were on the center of our thinking, it obviously
would be all we need to transfer any kind of knowledge from
one person to another. This, indeed, seems obvious for a lot
of people. But this is not what happens in practice. Language's
most problematic characteristic is its difficulty in conveying
sensory experiences.

same difference, you have 40,000 different languages
worldwide, to say 'doggie' and there are howmany-billions
of people who'll individually have a unique and personal
understanding? What's remarkable is we all share the same
turf, Or maybe, what is remarkable to me is we share common
bonds together with a diversity and capabilities to adapt.
Is it the adaptability or flexibility that makes evolutionary
intelligences (if you like) so precious?

Have you tried to teach somebody to ride a bicycle using just
words? No, it's not possible. Without experimentation, without
feeling the difficulty to balance, the problem of coordinating
hands, feet, etc, one would not learn how to ride a bicycle.
The same happens when one is learning how to drive a car: you
can't do it "by the book", you have to get inside one and
exercise the controls. Make errors and learn to correct them.
Ditto for flying a plane. This knowledge is not acquirable just by
reading. This knowledge is not transferable through language alone.

My cat just gave birth moments before/around the time a
visitor called. She found the safest place (my lap) and
purred like crazy just to be terrified the moment at giving
birth. There you are riding your bike going your way and
someone jumps out in front of you risking life or throwing
you into complete confusion. Now just ride the same bike
twice.

So I'd say we'd have to separate language with knowledge,
and I think the 'language' meant here is 'text' or symbols
that are abstracted sub units. Alone they mean nothing,
but as part of a chain in some afferent communication to
be recognised within the system and allotted to different
areas for 'processing' in light of previous experience and
knowledge. If some foundational knowledge is a priori,
what's a feeling? is it an instict? can you design a machine
with instincts!

I store my experiences as 'feelings' hypothetically like knowledge
was compressed data. The data file 'module' has its own class,
colour,shape which are far easier to throw about and link together
without decompressing the entire contents of the folder. I don't
actually believe we think this way, but its sort of easy to imagine
how an artificial mind could work with higher reasoning problems
in that way.

As we suggested in the previous section, human level intelligence
demands human level sensory perception. But artificial intelligence
(in the same way that an airplane is an artificial bird) may
eventually be constructed even without all those sensory equipments.
It will not be able to perform like a human being, it will never
understand some of our more "sensory" analogies, it will never
understand our world the way we do. But my bet is that it will be
able to do a lot of useful things, like a reasonable level of natural
language understanding, an intelligent (and comprehensible) teaching
tutor, a creative (and amazing) assistant to the scientist, a (serious)
centralizer of corporate knowledge, a worthwhile technical help desk
(with infinite patience), etc. These are subsets of the old dreams of
AI. And all of these applications seem to fundamentally require the
basic principles that stand behind intelligence."

SH: Philosophy still seems worthwhile doing :-) This last paragraph
runs against the current AI tide of claiming that for an AI to work,
it must have input from external sensory data. Sergio says not so,
although less than fully featured, still quite useful, and perhaps
not requiring that a mind be instantiated to obtain that usefulness.

I looked up Wolframs competition and the Turing machine,
and that great music link.
I mean you can't really get any shorter than 'Yes'n'No!'
I don't know what it was, maybe it was the idea of the infinite tape,
and connections and stuff, a thought occurred to me about human
joints,
you know like, hinge, ball and socket, semi-moveable and all the
different ways of making connections in 3D.

So N. there are lots of online papers which discuss points similar
to the ones you brought up in this thread, for instance, language.

Regards,
Stephen

Best,

N.


.

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