Andrew "language is not
enough to represent concepts"
Actually, it's not really concepts, period. (I'm not trying to be critical -
this is just an example of the extraordinary blindness that *alphabetic*
language culture has imposed on our minds).
Language, strictly - if you mean alphabetic language - words - is simply
sets of letters which encode SOUNDS - A-P-P-L-E refers in the first
instance to the sound of the concept not the content. Words are firstly
letter/sound labels for concepts.
Concepts themselves are a whole different medium. They're primarily
GRAPHIC/FIGURATIVE - pictographic/ideographic. Our concept of APPLE is not
a set of letters but a graphic of the real thing, connected to more detailed
sub-photographic/common sensical images of the real object.
But our culture is still clinging - by increasingly weak fingertips - to the
idea that language is letters.
It's still too hard to think of the reality - that the whole of real
language is this extraordinarily complex multi-level picture tree of
letters-sounds/labels - substantively graphic concepts -
graphic-to-photographic examples of concepts - real-world-objects-out-there.
(Note that the ultimate roots of the tree are embedded out there in the real
world - in real apples).
Jim et al's text progs are working with just the top level of the tree -
and Jim et al don't realise that the other levels of the tree are being
processed not by the computer but in their (the-human-programmer's) mind.
The task of AGI is to create artificial minds that can process the whole
tree themselves. ANd there's no way that will begin with language/words -
it's way too complex. We can only begin by emulating animals' simpler
non-linguistic conceptual systems.
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
Sent: Tuesday, May 14, 2013 4:53 AM
To: AGI
Subject: Re: [agi] A General O.D. (Operational Definition) for all AGI
projects
I found the quote I was looking for on page 360 of _The Way We Think:
Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities_ by Turner and
Fauconnier:
"We see in these examples the falsity of the general view that conceptual
structure is "encoded" by the speaker into a linguistic structure, and
that the linguistic structure is "decoded" by the hearer back into a
conceptual structure. An expression provides only sparse and efficient
prompts for constructing a conceptual structure."
You probably need their examples, and possibly the rest of the book to
be persuaded, but there it is. My take-away is that language is not
enough to represent concepts. That's not exactly what they said, but I
have other stuff supporting my belief, in addition to this.
andi
On Sat, May 11, 2013 11:38 pm, Andrew Babian wrote:
I read Turner and Fauconnier's book on this a while back. There is a quote
from it I've been wanting to look up that had a deep impact on me and
refers to stuff I've been harping on here. It is roughly that knowledge
cannot be represented by language. I may not have it exactly, but that's
what I took from it. Seems like no one here agrees with that, anyway.
Dimitry, If you know what I'm talking about I could use some help, as I
don't have my copy handy.
andi
Dimitry Volfson <[email protected]> wrote:
Look Up: "Conceptual Blending" on wikipedia.
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