Tintner wrote: > Your paper represents almost a literal application of the idea that > creativity is ingenious/lateral. Hey it's no trick to be just > ingenious/lateral or fantastic.
Ah ... before creativity was what was lacking. But now you're shifting arguments and it's something else that is lacking ;-) > > You clearly like producing new psychological ideas - from a skimming of your > work, you've produced several. However, I didn't come across a single one > that was grounded or where any attempt was made to ground them in direct, > fresh observation (as opposed to occasionally referring to an existing > scientific paper). That is a very strange statement. In fact nearly all my psychological ideas are grounded in direct, fresh **introspective** observation --- but they're not written up that way because that's not the convention in modern academia. To publish your ideas in academic journals, you need to ground them in the existing research literature, not in your own personal introspective observations. It is true that few of my psychological hypotheses are grounded in my own novel lab experiments, though. I did a little psych lab work in the late 90's, in the domain of perceptual illusions -- but the truth is that psych and neuroscience are not currently sophisticated enough to allow empirical investigation of really interesting questions about the nature of cognition, self, etc. Wait a couple decades, I guess. >In terms of creative psychology, that is consistent with > your resistance to producing prototypes - and grounding your > invention/innovation. Well, I don't have any psychological resistance to producing working software, obviously. Most of my practical software work has been proprietary for customers; but, check out MOSES and OpenBiomind on Google Code -- two open-source projects that have emerged from my Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC work ... It just happens that AGI does not lend itself to prototyping, for reasons I've already tried and failed to explain to you We're gonna launch trainable, adaptive virtual animals in Second Life sometime in 2008.... But I won't consider them real "prototypes" of Novamente AGI, even though in fact they will use several aspects of the Novamente Cognition Engine software. They won't embody the key emergent structures/dynamics that I believe need to be there to have human-level cognition -- and there is no simple prototype system that will do so. You celebrate Jeff Hawkins' prototype systems, but have you tried them? He's built (or, rather Dileep George has built) an image classification engine, not much different in performance from many others out there. It's nice work but it's not really an AGI prototype, it's an image classifiers. He may be sort-of labeling it a prototype of his AGI approach -- but really, it doesn't prove anything dramatic about his AGI approach. No one who inspected his code and ran it would think that it did provide such proof. > There are at least two stages of creative psychological development - which > you won't find in any literature. The first I'd call simply "original" > thinking, the second is truly "creative" thinking. The first stage is when > people realise they too can have new ideas and get hooked on the excitement > of producing them. Only much later comes the second stage, when thinkers > realise that truly creative ideas have to be grounded. Arguably, the great > majority of people who may officially be labelled as "creatives", never get > beyond the first stage - you can make a living doing just that. But the most > beautiful and valuable ideas come from being repeatedly refined against the > evidence. People resist this stage because it does indeed mean a lot of > extra work , but it's worth it. (And it also means developing that inner > faculty which calls for actual evidence). OK, now you're making a very different critique than what you started with though. Before you were claiming there are no creative ideas in AGI. Now, when confronted with creative ideas, you're complaining that they're not grounded via experimental validation. Well, yeah... And the problem is that if one's creative ideas pertain to the dynamics of large-scale, complex software systems, then it takes either a lot of time or a lot of money to achieve this validation that you mention. It is not the case that I (and other AGI researchers) are somehow psychologically undesirous of seeing our creative ideas explored via experiment. It is, rather, the case that doing the relevant experiments requires a LOT OF WORK, and we are few in number with relatively scant resources. What I am working toward, with Novamente and soon with OpenCog as well, is precisely the empirical exploration of the various creative ideas of myself, others whose work has been built on in the Novamente design, and my colleagues... -- Ben G ----- 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/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=72524341-a61b0e
