Mike,
I really don't know what to say any more.
Too much of what you suggest has been considered in great depth by other
people. It is an insult to them, if you ignore what they did.
You need to learn about cognitive science, THEN come back and argue
about it.
Richard Loosemore.
Mike Tintner wrote:
Richard,
I don't think I'm not getting it at all.
What you have here is a lot of good questions about how the graphics
level of processing that I am proposing, might work. And I don't have
the answers, and haven't really thought about them yet. What I have
proposed is a general idea loosely outlining 3 levels of processing. Now
if it's right, that alone is valuable. And there is at least some
evidence to think it might be - starting with the strange fact that
blind people produce graphics drawings, and the abundance of graphics
sign systems, plus, although I didn't really deal with this, that humans
do have difficulties understanding abstract verbal statements. I
obviously haven't had time to demonstrate it to you,. but the idea does
start to impose order on our sign systems and it's quite hard just to do
that.
All scientific ideas and theories only go so far and spell out things in
limited detail. The fact that they are not more detailed is NOT per se
an objection to them. People objected to Newton - [no, I am NOT
comparing this idea in any way with his work] - because he didn't spell
out how gravity worked. He didn't have to. What he showed about
gravitational attraction was enough.
I can't see that ANY of your questions pose an "immense brick wall." If
you were able to argue, for argument's sake: "look, the human brain
simply can't handle graphics outlines, only symbolic formulae" that
WOULD be a brick wall.
Just consider your questions again. If I ask you, for example, to
visualise a graphic of a man, and a penny you will, I suggest, do it.
Your brain WILL produce relevant graphics. Now how did it do that? Why
did it pick those particular graphics, given that you have vast numbers
available to you? Hey, neither you nor I have the answer to how it did
that (although we can think about it another time). But on one level,
what does it matter? The point is: IT DID IT Your brain was not
stymied, as your questions seem to imply it should be; it just went ahead.
Similarly, how does the brain achieve visual object recognition? How
does it manage to recognize "cats" and "dogs"? What templates does it
use? How does it manage to select a particular "cat" template, when it
may well have hundreds? I think we can be confident that it does use a
template or templates one way or another. Perhaps it just grabs the
nearest one at neuronal hand. (And BTW I'd be v.. interested to discuss
all this in another thread). But, whatever, the brain does it. ... But
if I were to be guided by the spirit of your objections, I would, say:
"hey I can think no more about this, the whole idea is ridiculous."
Ditto re your objections as to how the brain could create moving
graphics as I propose. No, I don't know exactly how it does it. Here's a
frame from a dream of mine - a man with a beard on flame, in a check
shirt, lying on the ground. I doubt that I have ever seen that bearded
head, with that check shirt, lying in that posture, let alone on flame.
The brain combined four new elements in a flash in a new moving picture.
If it can do that, there is no reason as yet to think that it can't
create moving graphics, or moving images if necessary to test out
sentences as I propose.
But re your mental models, I'm just asking, what on earth do you and
others mean? I'm sure whatever you're proposing is possible, I'd just
like to know what it is - and if I'm confused, i.e. find the whole
concept vague, then I'm pretty confident you and everyone else are also
confused - because, according to my theory, (and I believe this is
true), the brain DEMANDS to have concepts like that make sense. It
complains - positively aches to a greater or lesser degree - if they
don't, and yours will have already. (Repeat: there is no a priori
objection to the concept of mental models). There is an irony - you have
just asked fifteen or so questions of my graphics idea, and not one of
mental models.
P.S. A personal comment here - it's offered as an intuitive response,
not a reasoned judgment, & if it's no use or wong, screw it. You have
just offered an awful lot of what are actuially constructive
suggestions and proposals for further thought, as if they were damning
objections. I felt intuitively that you were dong something similar in
trying to define intelligence - trying to take things to minute pieces -
and in the end, turning an initially constructive drive into a negative
conclusion. Like I said, a purely intuitive response, and my apologies
if it's wrong or no use.
There is ONE BIG THING HERE THAT YOU ARE NOT GETTING. If you were to
sit down and try to implement an actual system that did the above, how
would you get it actually DO the drawing? What mechanisms would be in
there that, after looking at the WORDS, would conclude from the words
"the man climbed the penny" that a drawing of a penny and a man were
involved? How would those mechanisms choose what kind of man, what kind
of penny, what amount of detail in both? Would it spend a lot of time
deciding what clothes the man was wearing? And what his voice sounded
like? What color to use for the lines? How big to make the picture?
Whether to use an animation rather than a still picture? How would it
decide that there was something wrong with the picture of a man standing
on a regular sized penny? (I can do that: there, I just did, and it
was easy. Hey!! You just visualized me getting up and doing it. Cut
that out! :-)). Where in the picture you just visualized, of me doing
it, was the bit of the picture that said 'this is wrong, so classify the
sentence "man climbs on penny" as a meaningless sentence.
If not, what mechanisms would have been responsible for deciding that
the voice and the clothes, etc. were not relevant? How would this
mechanism know which bits were relevant and which not? If it made all
these decisions using pictures, what pictures would THEY be, and how
would it decide on the relevant bits of THOSE pictures?
If you think *everything* is done with pictures, you have to answer all
these issues.
When you try, you will run it to the most immense brick wall.
Please, rather than arguing in the abstract, start expanding on the
model you have suggested and really answer the questions I just posed.
As for your comments about not understanding the mental models idea, I
seriously doubt that it is only because the ideas are meaningless, and
need to be translated into pictures. There are a lot of people who do
understand them, who do not think that they do so in terms of pictures.
Perhaps there is one small point you are missing: the idea of a mental
model is NOT the same as a "symbolic" or "propositional" model. It is
not a literal picture, and not a propositional representation, but
somewhere in between. (I am using propositional and symbolic in their
standard sense, which is a little subtle).
Richard Loosemore
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