On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 6:48 PM, William Pearson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On 30/03/2008, Kingma, D.P. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > An audiovisual perception layer generates semantic interpretation on the > > (sub)symbolic level. How could a symbolic engine ever reason about the real > > world without access to such information? > > So a deafblind person couldn't reason about the real world? Put ear > muffs and a blind fold on, see what you can figure out about the world > around you. Less certainly, but then you could figure out more about > the world if you had magnetic sense like pidgeons. > > Intelligence is not about the modalities of the data you get, it is > about the what you do with the data you do get. > > All of the data on the web is encoded in electronic form, it is only > because of our comfort with incoming photons and phonons that it is > translated to video and sound. This fascination with A/V is useful, > but does not help us figure out the core issues that are holding us up > whilst trying to create AGI. > > Will Pearson
Intelligence is not *only* about the modalities of the data you get, but modalities are certainly important. A deafblind person can still learn a lot about the world with taste, smell, and touch, but the senses one has access to defines the limits to the world model one can build. If I put on ear muffs and a blind fold right now, I can still reason quite well using touch, since I have access to a world model build using e.g. vision. If you were deafblind and paralysed since your birth, would you have any possibility of spatial reasoning? No, maybe except for some extremely crude genetically coded heuristics. Sure, you could argue that an intelligence purely based on text, disconnected from the physical world, could be intelligent, but it would have a very hard time reasoning about interaction of entities in the physicial world. It would be unable to understand humans in many aspects: I wouldn't call that generally intelligent. Perception is a about learning and using a model of our physical world. Input is often high-bandwidth, while output is often low-bandwidth and useful for high-level processing (e.g. reasining and memory). Luckily, efficient methods are arising, so I'm quite optimistic about progress towards this aspect of intelligence. ------------------------------------------- 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=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
