Moving on from my previous post, the key distinction in mentality between
the literate and the new multimediate mentality is between PRE-SEMIOTIC and
SEMIOTIC.
The presemiotic person starts from the POV of his specialist sign system
and medium, when thinking about solving particular problems, and about
learning and problem-solving in general,. He starts with the language and
maths he knows, for example, and automatically assumes that those are the
ways to deal with things - and to deal with AGI. He is a "unimedia" person -
one medium or set of media and sign systems. He has little to no awareness
of the different powers of different media.
The semiotic mentality is already prefigured in Google. You start with the
THINGS you want to solve problems and/or learn about. And only then do you
ask which medium and sign system do you need to think about them. Hence with
Google, you first enter the subject, and then you consider [or should do]
whether you want to examine Images/ Video or effectively Text[Web] about
them. Very primitve now, but should get more sophisticated with choices re
Photos/Drawings/Paintings/Cartoons/ Sound Recordings/ Music etc..Are you
interested in solving problems or learning about schizophrenics? Well, logic
and maths are unlikely to be of any help - shock,horror for some AGI-ers, I
know, but I swear it's true - but it would be good to have not just
scientific texts about them, but obviously some videos - so that you don't
just have text about their "disordered speech" but can actually see and hear
them talking and moving, and see those disjointed movements as well as
thoughts.
Science is already going multimedia - you should no longer just read about
experiments, you should demand to see the videos - go to JOVE. AGI hasn't
caught up.
The semiotic mind is "multimedia", prepared to used any medium or sign
system, knowing that each medium and sign system can do different things and
show different dimensions of the world - and they are not interchangeable.
Once you understand the difference between the pre-semiotic and semiotic
mentality - & it takes time - you go back and rethink EVERYTHING you're
doing on AGI, because you almost certainly won't be using the media
necessary to solve the central problems.
Presemiotics will insist no, no, they can do it all with maths and logic,
while youtube buries them alive.
Re the evolution of symbols, Josh, this is a fascinating and confusing
subject. My guess at the moment is that the earliest symbols take the form
of 1) emotional urges and, inseparable, 2) movement urges. You have an
urge - which has a general nature - to "eat" something, and then has to be
specified - and you have an urge to "move" somewhere, say to "get away" from
a predator, and that in turn has to be specified as to which direction. And
a slime mould, presumably, has an urge to "move" towards the food that is
somewhere in the maze, it is negotiating.
Symbols - general abstract references - are in the very hierarchical
organization of living organisms. The whole central principle of movement
and thought - and Koestler is great on this in The Ghost in the Machine -
is - start with a general abstract trigger, and then gradually specify it in
stages.
Josh:I disagree with your breakdown. There are several key divides:
Concrete vs abstract
Continuous vs discrete
spatial vs symbolic
deliberative vs reactive
I can be very deliberative, thinking in 2-d pictures (when designing a
machine
part in my head, for example). I know lots of people who are completely
reactive in the symbolic world, hearing and replying to words by reflex
("Yes, dear"). (Believe it or not, this can even happen when typing
messages
to mailing lists.)
Spatial to symbolic actually happens quite early in evolution. A housefly
has
to recognize a pattern on its eyes and decide all at once to flee or
not --
it can't fly off with just the half its body the threat appears to. It
has
classified the picture of you with your flyswatter into a discrete
category.
A crow bending a wire as a tool is deliberating but thinking in concrete
terms, rather than abstractions. In fact, the jump to abstraction is
probably
the most human-specific, latest biologically, of the distinctions. But it
is
*easy* for a computer, which starts out working with, and being understood
by, abstractions in the first place.
I claim that we can and do think in each of the 16 modes implied by the
above
(and others as well).
I think the key to AI is not so much to figure how to operate in any given
one
of them, but how to operate in more than one, using one as a pilot wave or
boundary condition for another. *Creating* symbols from continuous
experience. Forming a conditioned reflex by deliberation and practice.
Figure out the reduction ratio of a planetary gear drive as a function of
the
number of teeth on the sun and planet gears. You can't do it without using
both visualization and algebra.
Now go out onto the tennis court and return a high kick serve wide to your
forehand in the deuce court. You have to watch the server's motion, the
ball's trajectory, estimate its spin, predict its flight after the bounce,
note whether it was in the service court and decide whether to stop play
and
call it out, decide where to return it and with what stroke, all in less
than
a second. Purely reactive, but also an irreducible mixture of the spatial
and
symbolic.
Josh
On Tuesday 29 April 2008 04:46:29 am, Russell Wallace wrote:
...
In biological evolution, S came first, of course. It was hard - likely
a hard step in the Great Filter - to make D on top of S. It was done,
still, and he who thinks we should try S first, then D, is not
necessarily irrational, even though I disagree with him.
I have some outline ideas on how to make S, but not scalably, not that
would easily generalize. So I think D should come first; and I think I
now know how to make D, in a way that would hopefully then scale to S.
I do not, of course, expect anyone except me to believe those personal
claims; but they are my reasons for believing the right path is D then
S.
Is there a consensus at least that AGI paths fall into the two
categories of D-then-S or S-then-D?
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