> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On
> Behalf Of Alan Grimes
> Sent: Saturday, November 30, 2002 7:51 PM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: [agi] father figure
>
>
> re: brain-brain interfaces...
>
> I don't think it makes very much sense to think that there is a special
> language that has a "vocabulary" of any kind that can be extracted from
> the brain.
>
> I would like to respond to this more but I would need to have a better
> understanding of what you mean by "hunk o' mind".
Alan,
Here is an excerpt from the previous draft of the in-process Novamente book.
These are the introductory sections of the chapter on Psynese, prior to the
technical bits of the chapter. They contain some Novamente terminology that
will be opaque due to lack of context, but they should give you a better
flavor for the Psynese concept...
The term NEIL is used in these excerpts for "Novamente Experiential
Interactive Learning system".
The node and link notation used occasionally here is explained in the
Novamente book excerpt given on the www.realai.net site.
-- Ben G
******************
1 Introduction
Obviously, different Novamente systems will need to communicate with one
another. But how?
It doesn't take a very detailed analysis to arrive at the conclusion that
human-style language is not an ideal mechanism for inter-Novamente
communication. Human language is a complex mechanism, riddled with
problems. We humans sometimes struggle to communicate simple things to each
other clearly, and some of our deeper, more radical or more personal
thoughts remain forever unshared, not because of a lack of desire to
communicate them, but because of the difficulty of mapping mind-stuff into
series of written or spoken words. Music, art, mathematics and other human
endeavors seek to work around the limitations of written and spoken
language, giving voice to aspects of the human experience that map poorly
into word sequences. Poetry tries to bend language into the shape of
thought and feeling, but frequently at the cost of comprehensibility.
Scientific and legal language attempt to be precise like mathematics yet at
the same time descriptive of real world situations - and they do succeed to
an extent, but learning them takes many years beyond the years spent on
ordinary language learning, and even so they "falsify" the ideas they
represent to a certain extent. Anyone who has read a lot of scientific
papers knows the process of "working backwards to the actual idea" from the
formalized discourse encountered in a research article.
Of course, we humans are accustomed to the limitations of written and spoken
language; our cultural institutions and our minds themselves are largely
shaped by these limitations. However, there is no reason that
inter-Novamente communication needs to be governed by these same
limitations. NEIL does need to learn human language, so that it can
communicate with human beings effectively, and absorb the vast amount of
knowledge available in human-written texts. But for communicating with
other NEILs, a NEIL system can do far better than human language or any
close approximation thereof. And even after its mastery of human language
is substantial, it may be that, for communicating some of its more complex
thoughts to humans, NEIL winds up using its own language rather than any
human tongue.
In this chapter we will describe a Novamente-only language known as Psynese
, which is radically different from any human language in some interesting
ways. Syntactically, Psynese is a minor augmentation of the Sasha language
that we have been using for knowledge representation throughout. What it
adds onto Sasha is a pragmatic communications framework appropriate for
Novamente communities. As noted in the discussion of EIL above, we believe
that Sasha will be useful alongside English during the NEIL teaching
process. If one has a community of NEIL systems talking to humans using
Sasha and English side-by-side, then communication between NEIL systems
using Psynese will be a natural extension.
As a variant of Sasha, Psynese bears scant resemblance to any human
language. However, it is of course a language in the formal sense; and
unlike a programming language, it serves largely the same function as human
language: the exchange of statements, questions, orders and so forth between
different intelligent systems.
2 Conceptual Overview of Psynese
One might wonder why a community of Novamentes would need a language at all.
After all, unlike humans, Novamente systems can simply exchange "brain
fragments" - subspaces of their Atomspaces. One Novamente can just send
relevant nodes and links to another Novamente (in binary form, an XML
representation, etc.), bypassing the linear syntax of language. This is in
fact the basis of Psynese: why transmit linear strings of characters when
one can directly transit Atoms? But the details are subtler than it might
at first seem.
One Novamente can't simply "transfer a thought" to another Novamente. The
problem is that the meaning of an atom consists largely of its relationships
with other atoms, and so to pass a node to another Novamente, it also has to
pass the atoms that it is related to, and so on, and so on. Atomspaces tend
to be densely interconnected, and so to transmit one thought accurately, a
Novamente system is going to end up having to transmit a copy of its entire
Atomspace! Even if privacy were not an issue, this form of communication
(each utterance coming packaged with a whole mind-copy) would present rather
severe processing load on the communicators involved.
The idea of Psynese is to work around this interconnectedness problem by
defining a Psynese vocabulary: a collection of atoms, associated with a
community of Novamentes, approximating the most important atoms inside that
community. The combinatorial explosion of direct-Atomspace communication is
then halted by an appeal to standardized Psynese atoms. Pragmatically, a
PsyneseVocabulary is contained in a PsyneseVocabulary server, a special
Novamente that exists to mediate communications between other Novamentes,
and provide Novamentes with information.
For instance, suppose NEIL1 wants to transmit the information "Elephants
live long lives" to NEIL2. Using Psynese, this is simple. If there are
ConceptNodes in a known PsyneseVocabulary PV corresponding to the linguistic
nodes "elephants" and "lifespan," then NEIL1 can just transmit the
relationship
Inheritance
lifespan/PV elephant/PV
long/PV
This tells NEIL2 that according to the definitions of "lifespan", "elephant"
and "long" contained in the PsyneseVocabulary PV, the posited relationship
holds true.
Note that in this example, and all the ones to follow in this section, the
nodes being referred to are conceptual nodes, not WordNodes. We are taking
the shortcut of using, say, elephant to refer to the ConceptNode linked to
the WordNode named "elephant." In reality what might be transmitted as a
Psynese utterance would look instead like the CRN:
AND
InheritanceLink
SchemaNode: lifespan/PV
ConceptNode: elephant/PV
PredicateNode: long/PV
SimilarityLink
SchemaNode: lifespan/PV
WordNode: #lifespan
SimilarityLink
ConceptNode: elephant/PV
WordNode: #elephant
SimilarityLink
PredicateNode: long/PV
WordNode: #long
But this is more awkward to write and to read, so we will ask the reader's
indulgence and continue using the compacted form for examples.
On the other hand, suppose NEIL1 wanted to tell NEIL2 that "Russians are
crazy." The obvious option is
InheritanceLink Russian/PV crazy/PV
But, perhaps NEIL1 doesn't like PV's definition of "crazy." It can try to
find a different PsyneseVocabulary with a better definition, and then
transmit something like
InheritanceLink Russian/PV crazy/PV1
Or, perhaps it simply wants to tell NEIL2 exactly what it means by "crazy".
Then it may send
InheritanceLink Russian/PV crazy
along with a set of relationships involving "crazy," examples of which might
be
InheritanceLink crazy interesting/PV
InheritanceLink crazy unusual/PV
InheritanceLink crazy dangerous/PV <.3>
Of course, it may also be that NEIL1 doesn't like the PV definition of one
of these terms, say "dangerous." In that case it can refer to another
PsyneseVocabulary, or, it can define the term it's using by giving another
set of relationships. The key is the fact that, at some point, NEIL1 can
stop defining terms in terms of other terms, and accept that the "socially
agreed-upon" meanings of the terms it's using are close enough to the
intended meanings.
The above examples involve human natural language terms, but this does not
have to be the case. PsyneseVocabularies can contain atoms representing
quantitative or other types of data, and can also contain purely abstract
concepts. The basic idea is the same. A Novamente has some atoms it wants
to convey to another Novamente, and it looks in a PsyneseVocabulary to see
how easily it can approximate these atoms in terms of "socially understood"
atoms. This is particularly effective if the Novamente receiving the
communication is familiar with the PsyneseVocabulary in question. Then the
recipient may already know the PsyneseVocabulary atoms it is being pointed
to; it may have already thought about the difference between these consensus
concepts and its own related concepts.
The general definition of a psynese expression, then, is: a Set of Atoms
that contains only:
. Nodes from PsyneseVocabularies
. Perceptual nodes (numbers, words, etc.)
. Relationships relating no nodes other than the ones in the above two
categories, and relating no relationships except ones in this category
. CRN's and SN's involving no relationships or nodes other than: the ones in
the above three categories, or in this category
This is not a "language" as we normally conceive it, but it serves the same
functions. Psynese is to Novamentes as human language is to humans. The
biggest differences from human language are:
. Psynese uses weighted, typed hypergraphs instead of linear strings of
symbols. This eliminates the "parsing" aspect of language (syntax being
mainly a way of projecting graph structures into linear expressions).
. Psynese lacks subtle and ambiguous referential constructions like "this",
"it" and so forth. These are tools allowing complex thoughts to be
compactly expressed in a linear way, but Novamentes don't need them. Atoms
can be named and pointed to directly without complex, poorly-specified
mechanisms mediating the process.
. Psynese has far less ambiguity. There may be atoms with more than one
aspect to their meanings, but the cost of clarifying such ambiguities is
much lower for Novamentes than for humans using language, and so habitually
there will not be the rampant ambiguity that we see in human expressions.
Basically, one gets the power of human language without the confusing parts.
In the long run, Novamentes and other AI's should have a much easier time
understanding each other than we do.
If one wishes to create a linear-string variant of Psynese, this is easy.
One can simply use Sasha syntax, with the addition of the /PV marker to
specify that a given Atom is intended as relative to a given
PsyneseVocabulary. This is basically what we have done above in giving
concrete examples of Psynese transmissions.
******************
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