You seem to grasp my point, and then let it slip through your fingers - although perhaps I need to spell it out.
Human concepts (of which language is the most prominent example) are fundamentally open-ended - and MEANT to be. Philosophers and rational thinkers of all kinds have fought against that for millennia - wanted as you do, one perfect, unambiguous language (in different forms including mathematical & logical). That open-endedness is FUNDAMENTAL to General Intelligence - that's a central part of what enables it to keep coming up with new ideas about every subject. But because you have been educated to be rational - and want right, unambiguous answers - you accept this, and then say : "Yes that's fine, I like it being open-ended; I just want it to be closed-ended" Hey, open-ended is open-ended, and the PRICE of that - the price of being able to handle things with infinite flexibility - is that you can MAKE MISTAKES - you "get the wrong end of the stick" in try to work out what someone else means by a concept, like, say, "handle", and you develop new variations of a concept that don't really work. FLEXIBILITY = PLENTY OF ERRORS. General Intelligence (AGI) involves a totally different and opposed mentality to that of Specific Intelligence (narrow AI). YKY: MT Good example, but how about: language is open-ended, period and capable of "infinite" rather than myriad interpretations - and that open-endedness is the whole point of it?. > > Simple example much like yours : "handle". You can attach words for objects ad infinitum to form different sentences - > > "handle an egg/ spear/ pen/ snake, stream of water etc." - > > the hand shape referred to will keep changing - basically because your hand is capable of an infinity of shapes and ways of handling an infinity of different objects. . > > And the next sentence after that first one, may require that the reader know exactly which shape the hand took. > > But if you avoid natural language, and its open-endedness then you are surely avoiding AGI. It's that capacity for open-ended concepts that is central to a true AGI (like a human or animal). It enables us to keep coming up with new ways to deal with new kinds of problems and situations - new ways to "handle" any problem. (And it also enables us to keep recognizing new kinds of objects that might classify as a "knife" - as well as new ways of handling them - which could be useful, for example, when in danger). Sure, AGI needs to handle NL in an open-ended way. But the question is whether the internal knowledge representation of the AGI needs to allow ambiguities, or should we use an ambiguity-free representation. It seems that the latter choice is better. Otherwise, the knowledge stored in episodic memory would be open to interpretations and may need to errors in recall, and similar problems. ------------------------------------------- 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
