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.
________________________________
agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription
