Mike Tintner wrote:
RL:In order to completely ground the system, you need to let the system
build its own symbols
V. much agree with your whole argument. But - & I may well have missed
some vital posts - I have yet to get the slightest inkling of how you
yourself propose to do this.
Well, for the purposes of the present discussion I do not need to say
how, only to say that there is a difference between two different
research strategies for finding out what the mechanism is that does this.
One strategy (the one that I claim has serious problems) is where you
try to have your cake and eat it too: let the system build its own
symbols, with attached parameters that 'mean' whatever they end up
meaning after the symbols have been built, BUT then at the same time
insist that some of the parameters really do 'mean' things like
probabilities or likelihood or confidence values. If the programmer
does anything at all to include mechanisms that rely on these meanings
(these interpretations of what the parameters signify) then the
programmer has second-guessed what the system itself was going to use
those things for, and you have a conflict between the two.
My strategy is to keep my hands off, not do anything to strictly
interpret those parameters, and experimentally observe the properties of
systems that seem loosely consistent with the known architecture of
human cognition.
I have a parameter, for instance, that seems to be a "happiness" or
"consistency" parameter attached to a knowledge-atom. But beyond
roughly characterising it as such, I do not insert any mechanisms that
(implicitly or explicitly) lock the system into such an intepretation.
Instead, I have a wide variety of different candidate mechanisms that
use that parameter, and I look at the overall properties of systems that
use these different candidate mechanisms. I let the system use the
parameter according to the dictates of whatever mechanism is in place,
but then I just explore the consequences (the high level behavior of the
system).
In this way I do not get a conflict between what I think the parameter
'ought' to mean and what the system is implicitly taking it to 'mean' by
its use of the parameter.
I could start talking about all the different candidate mechanisms, but
there are thousands of them (at least thousands of candidates that I go
so far as to test: they are generated in a semi-automatic way, so there
are an unlimited number of potential candidates).
Richard Loosemore
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