Curiosity is a goal-driven behavior. The goal is to acquire more information about the environment.
It's a criterion, which is a meta-goal. Goals are empirically specific, for curiosity they would concrete subjects of research. My point stands, - intelligence has a built-in motivation that can drive behavior. It's actually an evolutionarily hardwired subgoal of our other goals, since more information is usually pretty handy for a big brain to use when it comes time to seek other goals. It's hardwired in the cortex, which evolutionarily recent area, thus initially instrumental to older areas. All acquired motives start as instrumental (as in "instrumental conditioning"), but can become stronger than prior / innate / "terminal" motives if their instrumental value is broad enough. Instincts are / were instrumental too (for reproduction), but in a very narrow way. I don't think manufacturing ever-greater amounts of your DNA is you goal anymore, right? Human motivation is fluid, & would be even more fluid if it weren't for our stupid constraints. From: Aaron Hosford Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2013 11:39 AM To: AGI Subject: Re: [agi] Robots and Slavery Curiosity is a goal-driven behavior. The goal is to acquire more information about the environment. It's actually an evolutionarily hardwired subgoal of our other goals, since more information is usually pretty handy for a big brain to use when it comes time to seek other goals. On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 9:35 AM, Boris Kazachenko <[email protected]> wrote: Aaron, Intelligence is necessary to implement complex behavior, but it is not sufficient. There must be goal-directedness built into the system, either through explicit goals in the form of goal states and search heuristics, implicit goals in the form of chained reward signals, or some hybrid or alternative. Otherwise, your super-intelligent robot is just going to sit there, potentially observing and understanding everything but doing nothing whatsoever about it. Not true, behavior can by driven by pure curiosity: search for additively predictive patterns, which is what intelligence all about. Think of Einstein's "holy curiosity". Human motivation consists of three incrementally advanced subsystems: instincts, conditioning / RL, & pure curiosity: unsupervised learning. Shifting balance of power between these subsystems determines our "identity". Instincts is biological crap, conditioning is relatively very crude / obsolete, only pure curiosity will have any meaning once we outgrow our bodies: http://cognitive-focus.blogspot.com/2012/06/motivation-evolution-of-value.html Motivation is mental mechanisms that drive our behavior, including cognitive behavior: introspection, analysis, & planning for somatic behavior. Values/ motives in humans & higher animals can be divided into three broad categories, according to the mechanism that formed or selected them: Evolution selects instincts fit for their own propagation, innate but subsequently modulated by usage, Conditioning value-charges stimuli coincident with previously value-loaded stimuli in time or space, Cognitive curiosity searches / selects for predictive patterns, even if they consist of value-free stimuli. Higher mechanisms accelerate adaptive value acquisition by acting on increasingly mediated responses: from immediate behavioral reactions to longer-term attention, prediction, & planning. Brain areas that implement these value-acquisition mechanisms likely evolved in the same sequence: Instincts, largely physiological & traceable to 4Fs, are encoded mainly in brainstem & hypothalamus. Conditioning is initiated by basal ganglia & limbic system, then extended & generalized by neocortex. Predictive curiosity is an innate driver of neocortex, which is also heavily modulated by lower motives. This scheme is vaguely similar to triune brain model, but in my interpretation these substrates differ mainly in the mechanism by which they acquire values, rather than in resulting & relatively transient motives themselves. These value acquisition mechanisms are innate, but their relative strength varies. Our instincts are pretty basic & similar to those of other mammals. An excellent account of that level of motivation is Jaak Panksepp‘s “Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions“. The discussion below is mostly on conditioning & cognition: increasingly adaptive mechanisms which seem to strengthen with our personal growth... until it hits harsh constraints of biological life cycle... http://www.cognitivealgorithm.info/2012/01/cognitive-algorithm.html AGI | Archives | Modify Your Subscription AGI | Archives | Modify Your Subscription ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
