Ben,
I am not sure the question has been stated clearly enough to be answered
meaningfully, yet.
The list given by your correspondent was extremely vague: what does it
mean to talk about "an implicit set of constraints on ontologies that
can be discovered by systematic 'scientific' investigation"? For
example, there are things I can only perceive *directly* (whatever that
means) if they are in 3-D space, but "systematic scientific
investigation" allows me to think about spaces with other numbers of
dimensions, in all kinds of ways. Same goes for causality.
Having said that, I know what you mean at an intuitive level (and I do
believe there are built in biasses) but I think the problem is deeply
tangled up with what you think the machinery is, that is getting
biassed. I am not even convinced that the question can be properly
asked unless you can talk in terms of that machinery.
And what is the boundary between an ontological bias and a lesser
tendency to learn a certain kind of thing, which can nevertheless be
overridden through experience?
Richard Loosemore.
Ben Goertzel wrote:
Hi,
In a recent offlist email dialogue with an AI researcher, he made the
following suggestion regarding the "inductive bias" that DNA supplies
to the human brain to aid it in learning:
*****
What is encoded in the DNA may include a starting ontology (as proposed,
with exasperating vaguess, by developmental psychologists, though much
more complex than anything they have thought of) but the more important
thing is an implicit set of constraints on ontologies that can be
discovered by systematic 'scientific' investigation. So it might not
work in an arbitrary universe, including some simulated universes,e.g.
'tileworld' universes.
One such constraint (as Kant pointed out in 1780) is the
assumption that everything physical happens in 3-D space and
time. Another is the requirement for causal determinism (for most
processes).
There may also be constraints on kinds of information-processing
entities that can be learnt about in the environment, e.g. other humans,
other animals, dead-ancestors, gods, spirits, computer games, ....
The major, substantive, ontology extensions have to happen in (partially
ordered) stages, each stage building on previous stages, and brain
development is staggered accordingly.
******
My response to him was that these "genetic biases" are indeed encoded
in the Novamente design, but in a somewhat unsystematic and scattered way.
For instance, in the Novamente system,
-- the restriction to 3D space is implicit in the set of elementary
predicates and procedures supplied
to the system for preprocessing perceptual data on its way to abstract
cognition
-- the bias toward causal determinism is implicit in an inference
control mechanism that specifically
tries to build "PredictiveAttractionLink" relationships that embody
likely causal relationships
etc.
I have actually never gone through the design with an eye towards
identifying exactly how each
important "genetic bias" of cognition is encoded in the system.
However, this would be an interesting
and worthwhile thing to do.
Toward that end, it would be interesting to have a systematic list
somewhere of the genetic biases
that are thought to be most important for structuring human cognition.
Does anyone know of a well-thought-out list of this sort. Of course I
could make one by surveying
the cognitive psych literature, but why reinvent the wheel?
-- Ben G
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