Hi,
It seems to me that discussing AI or human thought in terms of goals and subgoals is a very "narrow-AI" approach and destined to fail in general application.
I think it captures a certain portion of what occurs in the human mind. Not a large portion, perhaps, but an important portion.
Why? Because to conceive of a goal requires a perspective outside of and encompassing the goal system. We can speak in a valid way about the goals of a system, or the goals of a person, but it is always from a perspective outside of that system.
But, the essence of human reflective, deliberative awareness is precisely our capability to view ourselves from a "perspective outside ourselves." ... and then use this view to model ourselves and ultimately change ourselves, iteratively...
It seems to me that a better functional description is based on "values", more specifically the eigenvectors and eigenvalues of a highly multidimensional model *inside the agent* which drive its behavior in a very simple way: It acts to reduce the difference between the internal model and perceived reality.
I wouldn't frame it in terms of eigenvectors and eigenvalues, because I don't know how you are defining addition or scalar multiplication on this space of "mental models." But I agree that the operation of "acting to reduce the difference between internal models and perceived reality" is an important part of cognition. It is different from explicit goal-seeking, which IMO is also important.
Goals thus emerge as third-party descriptions of behavior, or even as post hoc internal explanations or rationalizations of its own behavior, but don't merit the status of fundamental drivers of the behavior.
I distinguished "explicit goals" from "implicit goals." I believe that in your comments you are using the term "goal" to mean what I term "explicit goal." I think that some human behavior is driven by explicit goals, and some is not. I agree that the identification of the **implicit goals** of a system S (the functions the system S acts like it is seeking to maximize) is often best done by another system outside the system S. Nevertheless, I think that implicit goals are worth talking about, and can meaningfully be placed in a hierarchy. -- Ben ----- 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
