Mike, You have been pushing this anti-symbol/pro-image dichotomy for a long time. I don't understand it.
Images are set, or nets, of symbols. So, if, as you say
" all symbols provide an extremely limited *inventory of the
world* and all its infinite parts and behaviors "
then images are equally limited, since they are nothing but set or nets of
symbols. Your position either doesn't make sense or is poorly stated.
What you are saying is somewhat like the statement that "people don't matter
in politics, institutions do." Such a statement ignores the fact that
institutions are made of people. But given the human mind's ability to find
that portions of a statement that makes sense (the ability that enables
metaphor work), one hearing this statement might understand it as implying
that people acting together are more important in politics than people
acting alone.
Perhaps your viewpoint is that merely considering symbols operating alone or
in small numbers fails to explain many important aspects of human-like
intelligence. If so, that makes sense.
But that idea is shared by many people on this list. Hofstadter's Copycat
and his fluid reasoning approach, which has been praised by many on this
list (Pei Wang worked with Hofstadter), is based exactly on the idea of
computations that involve so many individual actors that many of its
processes become "liquid" -- in much the same sense that a financial market
with many purchasers and sellers becomes liquid. Hofstadter's Copycat,
combined both local and global influences, as well as randomness to control
a synthesis of a solution to a problem. Promising research (the Serre paper
I have cited so many times before) has been done on image recognition, using
digital and hierarchical memory representations (both symbolic), that --
even with the trivial amount of computation resources involved compared to
that of the human visual system -- provides certain types of visual
recognition that out perform humans.
So feel free to keep pushing the importance of computing on complex sets or
nets of symbols, such as visual images -- or the complex context that builds
up as one reads a good novel.
But please stop attacking the use of symbols, unless you can come up with
arguments much better than you have in the past. The activation of a neuron
in a human brain can be viewed as a symbol, because such neurons tend to
have receptive fields, when specify what patterns of synaptic or chemical
inputs will activate it to varying degrees or in varying firing patterns.
So apparently the human mind does pretty will with symbols. Symbols can be
probabilistic. Their meanings can be context sensitive. They can represent
correlations that humans haven't even explicitly considered. Even almost all
so-called non-symbolic computing, such as that with neural nets, use symbols
to represent their weights. All digital computers are symbolic, and one can
interpret many analogue computers as being symbolic as well.
So focus less on attacking symbols, and more on describing what its is about
computing on large set or nets of symbols, such as those involved in images,
that you think is more needed.
Ed Porter
-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Tintner [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Friday, February 15, 2008 10:34 AM
To: agi@v2.listbox.com
Subject: [agi] A 1st Step To Using Your Image-ination
Perhaps this site will help some of you to start seeing that symbols have
extremely limited powers, and something more is needed - and also give you a
sense of how attitudes are changing.
http://www.imageandmeaning.org/
(it's part of the Envisioning Science Program - check out the movie)
also:
The Initiative in Innovative Computing (IIC)
http://iic.harvard.edu/
No v. coherent message behind all this stuff - just a lot of ongoing
questions, which I hope will get you to start asking questions. And they're
mainly talking about the need to envision *science*. What they haven't
realised is what follows - the need to envision and image-ine intelligence,
period. But this shows things starting to happen. And the momentum will
build.(Welcome info re anything related).
Perhaps it will start to give you a sense that words and indeed all symbols
provide an extremely limited *inventory of the world* and all its infinite
parts and behaviours.
I welcome any impressionistic responses here, including confused questions.
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agi
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