IMO, humans **can** reprogram their top-level goals, but only with difficulty. And this is correct: a mind needs to have a certain level of maturity to really reflect on its own top-level goals, so that it would be architecturally foolish to build a mind that involved revision of supergoals at the infant/child phase.
However, without reprogramming our top-level goals, we humans still have a lot of flexibility in our ultimate orientation. This is because we are inconsistent systems: our top-level goals form a set of not-entirely-consistent objectives... so we can shift from one wired-in top-level goal to another, playing with the inconsistency. (I note that, because the logic of the human mind is probabilistically paraconsistent, the existence of inconsistency does not necessarily imply that "all things are derivable" as it would in typical predicate logic.) Those of us who seek to become "as logically consistent as possible, given the limitations of our computational infrastructure" have a tough quest, because the human mind/brain is not wired for consistency; and I suggest that this inconsistency pervades the human wired-in supergoal set as well... Much of the inconsistency within the human wired-in supergoal set has to do with time-horizons. We are wired to want things in the short term that contradict the things we are wired to want in the medium/long term; and each of our mind/brains' self-organizing dynamics needs to work out these evolutionarily-supplied contradictions on its own.... One route is to try to replace our inconsistent initial wiring with a more consistent supergoal set; the more common route is to oscillate chaotically from one side of the contradiction to the other... (Yes, I am speaking loosely here rather than entirely rigorously; but formalizing all this stuff would take a lot of time and space...) -- Ben F On 12/3/06, Matt Mahoney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
--- Mark Waser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > You cannot turn off hunger or pain. You cannot > > control your emotions. > > Huh? Matt, can you really not ignore hunger or pain? Are you really 100% > at the mercy of your emotions? Why must you argue with everything I say? Is this not a sensible statement? > > Since the synaptic weights cannot be altered by > > training (classical or operant conditioning) > > Who says that synaptic weights cannot be altered? And there's endless > irrefutable evidence that the sum of synaptic weights is certainly > constantly altering by the directed die-off of neurons. But not by training. You don't decide to be hungry or not, because animals that could do so were removed from the gene pool. Is this not a sensible way to program the top level goals for an AGI? -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
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