I am taking Mark Waser's recent points and separating them out for ease
of analysis.
Mark Waser wrote:
I've just realized that much of the problem that we're all having in
this discussion is the lack of realization of how much of a bottom-up
design Richard is assuming vs. how much of a top-down design that
many others are assuming.
If I understand Richard correctly, he is assuming that it is
necessary to make symbols themselves complex and that each symbol
needs his four forces of doom: Memory, Development, Identity, and
Non-Linearity.
I think it is a serious mistake to say that I have been seeing AGI as a
matter of bottom-up design, where everyone else is seeing it as a
top-down design.
When I talk about complexity being in the symbols, this is just a
convenient fiction that makes the argument easier to write down, and it
does not indicate at all that I something see things in a bottom up way.
Why is it a convenient fiction? Because I am talking about the
mechanisms that lie in and around the symbols, and there is an infinite
range of different architectures that go all the way from [everything is
inside the symbols!] to [a symbol is nothing but a bunch of pointers,
and everything else is built into various external mechanisms that pass
these pointers around]. I don't want to get entangled in the arguments
about which of these perspectives is best, so I just default all the
time to talking as if virtually everything is inside the symbols.
But absolutely nothing depends on this.
So when I talk about symbols having to be complex it just means that if
you are going to get all the mechanisms working that need to be in and
around symbols, those mechanisms are going to interact in ways that are
complex. I don't care if they are inside or outside: it will be the
same either way.
And really, in every other way you could possibly think of, I am no more
"bottom-up" than anyone else. It is just a non-issue.
Now on to the next topic.
Richard Loosemore
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agi
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