On Feb 17, 2008 5:27 PM, Ben Goertzel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I've got to wonder if the masses of text on the Internet could, in themselves, > display a sufficient richness of patterns to obviate the need for grounding > in another domain like a physical or virtual world, or mathematics. > > In other words, maybe what you think needs to be gotten from grounding > in a nonlinguistic domain, could somehow be gotten indirectly via grounding > in masses of text? > > I am not confident this is feasible, nor that it isn't ... and it's > not the approach > I'm following ... but I'm uncomfortable dismissing it out of hand...
*nods* I'm comfortable dismissing it out of hand, for several reasons, not least of which is that we humans do not and cannot do anything remotely resembling what you're proposing. It's been described as the equivalent of trying to learn Chinese equipped only with a Chinese-Chinese dictionary - something already hopelessly impossible for humans. It's actually much worse than that, because we'd start off knowing our own native language, and that Chinese is spoken by humans who have mostly the same concepts as we have. It's actually much worse even than a newborn baby trying to learn Chinese as his first language from a Chinese-Chinese dictionary without ever hearing any form of speech, because the baby starts off with a lot of cognitive machinery about language, the real world and connections between the two, that an AI program doesn't. At the end of the day, the Internet just doesn't contain most of the needed information. Consider the question of whether it's possible to learn about water flowing downhill, from Internet text alone. From Google (example not original to me, though I forget who first ran this test): Results 1 - 10 of about 864 for "water flowing downhill" Results 1 - 10 of about 2,130 for "water flowing uphill" The prosecution rests :) ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
