This raises another v. interesting dimension of KB's and why they are limited.
The social dimension. You might, purely for argument's sake, be able to name a
vast amount of unnamed parts of the world. But you would then have to secure
social agreement for them to become practically useful. Not realistic - if you
were say to add even scores let alone thousands of names for each bit of your
hand.
And even when there are a set of agreed words - and this is a problem that
absolutely plagues all of us on this board - there may still not be an agreed
terminology. For example, we are having massive problems as a community, along
with our society, with what words like "intelligence," "AGI", "symbol," "image"
"image schema", etc etc. mean. We may agree broadly on the words that are
relevant in a given area, but we have no agreed terminology as to which of
those words should be used when, and what they mean.. And actually, now that I
think of it, the more carefully intellectuals define their words, the MORE
disagreements and misunderstandings you often get. Words like "free" and
"determined" for philosophers and scientists (and all of us here) are absolute
minefields.
MT:> I believe I offered the beginning of a v. useful way to conceive of this
> whole area in an earlier post.
>
> The key concept is "inventory of the world."
>
> First of all, what is actually being talked about here is only a
> VERBAL/SYMBOLIC KB.
>
> One of the grand illusions of a literature culture is that words/symbols
> refer to everything. The reality is that we have a v. limited verbal
> inventory of the world. Words do not describe most parts of your body, for
> example, only certain key divisions. Check over your hand for a start and
> see how many bits you can name - minute bit by bit. When it comes to the
> movements of objects, our vocabulary is breathtakingly limited.
>
> In fact, our verbal/symbolic inventory of the world (as provided for by our
> existing cultural vocabulary - for all its millions of words) is, I suggest,
> only a tiny fraction of our COMMON SENSE KB/ inventory of the world - i.e.
> that knowledge we hold purely in sensory image form - and indeed in
> common-sense form (since as Tye points out, we never actually
> experience/operate one sense in isolation - even though we have the
> intellectual illusion that we do).
>
> When we learn to respect the extent of our true common sense knowledge of
> the world as distinct from our formal, verbal knowledge of the world, we
> will realise another major reason why CYC like projects are doomed. They
> have nothing to do with common sense. Of course they will never be able to
> work out, pace Minsky, whether you can whistle and eat at the same time, or
> whether you can push or pull an object with a string. This is true common
> sense knowledge.
I can give labels to every tiny sub-section of my hand, thus increasing the
"resolution" of the symbolic description. If I give labels to each very small
visual features of my hand, then the distinction between visual representation
and symbolic representation disappears. Therefore, I think symbolic KBs like
Cyc's is not doomed -- the symbolic KB can merge with perceptual grounding in a
"continuum" fashion.
YKY
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