It seems fairly obvious to me that a large component of "thinking" is based
upon visually derived concepts. In evolutionary terms language arrived late
to the party, or only existed in primitive low bandwidth forms of
communication.
If you think only in terms of linguistics many common techniques used in the
movies will pass you by, and silent movies will be totally
incomprehensible. Even worse, your ability to navigate around and recognise
common situations may be severely impaired.
This doesn't mean that language is unimportant. The addition of language
effectively supercharges the evolutionary earlier modes of thought,
permitting advanced features such as being able to count large numbers of
things. One of my favourite books "ape, primitive man and child" deals with
this transition from pre-linguistic to linguistically augmented
intelligence.
On 16/02/2008, Mike Tintner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> Ed & Co, Rather than answer your objections directly, I propose to :
>
> 1) In this post, demonstrate that visual reasoning while still regarded by
> our culture generally (& not just AI/AGI) as a minimal and peripheral part
> of our thinking actually plays a massive and fairly continuous part in our
> life - & we are extremely unaware of it
>
> 2) In an accompanying post, not only provide some more dramatic examples
> of visual reasoning, but provide proof that visual processing cannot be
> handled by symbolic processing (or not to any serious, practical extent)
>
> If you still object not unreasonably, given current attitudes, that this
> is all peripheral to AGI, I will then in a day or two:
>
> 3) demonstrate that all this lies at the dead centre of AGI and most, if
> not all of its unsolved problems..
>
> {Please start downloading this file:
>
> http://www.mediafire.com/?2wxyn5rjdyq
>
> Don't open yet, but if it doesn't work, post immediately!!- the rest is
> pointless without it]
>
> I think we can agree that our culture regards visual reasoning as a pretty
> peripheral part of thinking generally and our life. For example, it is
> fairly standard in psychology textbooks to ask whether thinking and language
> are not identical/interdependent. The main point here is that while people
> know we don't only think in language (and symbols), they have a generally
> hard time talking about other forms of thinking, or instancing them in any
> detail. Even I, who have enormous sympathy with my own opinions, have had a
> hard time explaining the importance of visual and common sense (literally
> all-the-senses-together) thinking - and didn't even realise till a recent
> exchange with Pei, how massively important observation-as-reasoning, (incl.
> visual reasoning) is.
>
> It is not uncommon for even a highly educated psychologist to say
> something like: "I only think in language; I never think in visuals."
>
> So I would like you to engage in some visual reasoning - and I think
> you'll find that you won't be able to help it - it happens automatically.
>
> I'd like you in a minute to look at the slideshow of visuals in that
> file., and as you do,observe yourself as best you can. What I think you'll
> find is that you don't look at any photo as a "shot" but rather as a "scene"
> - a story in pictures - with a before and after. And it's quite remarkable
> how much you do infer about each photo - how you can and do:
>
> -predict to some extent what subjects are likely to do next
> -detect what subjects may have done just before
> -identify where the scene is taking place
>
> and could, if asked, fill in a whole story around the photos.
>
> Please look at the whole file now....!!
>
> And when you've looked, you might start asking yourself more detailed
> questions about how you came to work out all you did about those photos.
>
> How do you know where people and animals are likely to move, objects are
> likely to move/splash, whether a figure is threatening to reach or
> actually reaching for his gun, considering shooting or about to shoot a
> rifle, what those girls on the sofa are trying to do, what those four feet
> mean, what that man by the sea is looking at and even what mood he might be
> in, how that woman dancing is talking to the man and how he is reacting, why
> that lovers' embrace is particularly hot, why that man is a drunk,how a
> child or the cat will play that piano and even react and what noises she may
> make, what those people in the dark are looking at, and so on ...?
>
> One thing's for sure: you are doing a lot of visual reasoning.
>
> And in fact, you are doing visual reasoning all day long - reasoning -
> composing stories-in-pictures about what has just happened and is about to
> happen in front of you - where objects are going to move, or how they've
> just moved, (fallen on the floor), how the people around you are about to
> move, how fast they will approach you and whether that car might hit you,
> what their expressions mean, and whether they are likely to be friendly or
> come on or be angry, and how fast that blood may coagulate, whether that
> light indicates someone is in a room, whether the clouds indicate rain,
> whether those people are grouping together in friendship or to fight,
> whether that shop attendant is going to take too long etc etc.
>
> And all day long you are in effect doing tacit physics, chemistry,
> biology, psychology, sociology about the world around you. But almost none
> of it involves formal reasoning that any of those disciplines could
> explain. They couldn't begin to tell you for example how you work out
> visually how things and animals and people are likely to behave - how you
> read the emotional complexities of a face - how someone is straining that
> smile too hard. There are no formulae that can tell you just by looking
> whether that suitcase is likely to be too heavy.
>
> All of this is visual and common-sense reasoning, most of which you'd be
> v. hard put to explain verbally let alone mathematically or logically .
>
> And that's why you were that wonderful little scientist of legend as an
> infant, pre-verbally exploring all the physical qualiities and nature of the
> world, conducting all those physical experiments with objects and people -
> very largely without words. And actually you've never stopped being a tacit
> scientist.
>
> For the moment, all I want you to retain is that we are all doing a
> massive amount of tacit, visual, commonsense reasoning which we are,
> blithely unaware of..
>
> The supreme example of our blind prejudice here is our idea that thinking
> is primarily a medium of language. Seems obvious. And yet, if you stop to
> think about it, there is only one form of thinking that never stops from the
> moment you wake till the moment you go to sleep, and that is the
> movie-in-the round that is your consciousness. It never stops. Verbal
> thinking stops. The movie goes on and on with you continually visually
> working out what is going on or about to go on "behind the scenes." And when
> your unconscious brain wants to think,it always, always thinks in movies
> never in just words. Movies are the basic medium of thought - not just
> pictures, still pictures - but continuous rolling movies, involving all the
> senses simultaneously. That's how you interpreted those photos - as
> slices-of- , stills-from-a-movie - and NOT just as pure photos.
>
> I merely want to suggest here - and not really argue - that all that
> visual reasoning is indeed truly visual - that we actually process all those
> photos and visuals as *whole images* and *whole image sequences* against
> similar images/sequences stored in memory, and that we couldn't possibly
> process them as just symbols. In the next post, I will zero in on a simple
> proof.
>
> P.S. I am not "attacking symbols" - I am attacking the idea that we or an
> AGI can think in symbols exclusively, and that includes thinking in
> images-as-symbolic-formulae. I believe that we think - and so must an AGI -
> in symbols-AND- graphics/schemas-AND detailed images - simultaneously,
> interdependently - that we are the greatest movie on earth with
> words/symbols-AND-pictures.
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