Brad Paulsen wrote:
All,
Here's a question for you:
What does fomlepung mean?
If your immediate (mental) response was "I don't know." it means you're
not a slang-slinging Norwegian. But, how did your brain produce that
"feeling of not knowing"? And, how did it produce that feeling so fast?
Your brain may have been able to do a massively-parallel search of your
entire memory and come up "empty." But, if it does this, it's
subconscious. No one to whom I've presented the above question has
reported a conscious "feeling of searching" before having the conscious
feeling of not knowing.
It could be that your brain keeps a "list of things I don't know." I
tend to think this is the case, but it doesn't explain why your brain
can react so quickly with the feeling of not knowing when it doesn't
know it doesn't know (e.g., the very first time it encounters the word
"fomlepung").
My intuition tells me the feeling of not knowing when presented with a
completely novel concept or event is a product of the "Danger, Will
Robinson!", reptilian part of our brain. When we don't know we don't
know something we react with a feeling of not knowing as a survival
response. Then, having survived, we put the thing not known at the head
of our list of "things I don't know." As long as that thing is in this
list it explains how we can come to the feeling of not knowing it so
quickly.
Of course, keeping a large list of "things I don't know" around is
probably not a good idea. I suspect such a list will naturally get
smaller through atrophy. You will probably never encounter the
fomlepung question again, so the fact that you don't know what it means
will become less and less important and eventually it will drop off the
end of the list. And...
Another intuition tells me that the list of "things I don't know", might
generate a certain amount of cognitive dissonance the resolution of
which can only be accomplished by seeking out new information (i.e.,
"learning")? If so, does this mean that such a list in an AGI could be
an important element of that AGI's "desire" to learn? From a functional
point of view, this could be something as simple as a scheduled
background task that checks the "things I don't know" list occasionally
and, under the right circumstances, "pings" the AGI with a pang of
cognitive dissonance from time to time.
So, what say ye?
Isn't this a bit of a no-brainer? Why would the human brain need to
keep lists of things it did not know, when it can simply break the word
down into components, then have mechanisms that watch for the rate at
which candidate lexical items become activated .... when this mechanism
notices that the rate of activation is well below the usual threshold,
it is a fairly simple thing for it to announce that the item is not known.
Keeping lists of "things not known" is wildly, outrageously impossible,
for any system! Would we really expect that the word
"ikrwfheuigjsjboweonwjebgowinwkjbcewijcniwecwoicmuwbpiwjdncwjkdncowk-
owejwenowuycgxnjwiiweudnpwieudnwheudxiweidhuxehwuixwefgyjsdhxeiowudx-
hwieuhyxweipudxhnweduiweodiuweydnxiweudhcnhweduweiducyenwhuwiepixuwe-
dpiuwezpiweudnzpwieumzweuipweiuzmwepoidumw" is represented somewhere as
a "word that I do not know"? :-)
I note that even in the simplest word-recognition neural nets that I
built and studied in the 1990s, activation of a nonword proceeded in a
very different way than activation of a word: it would have been easy
to build something to trigger a "this is a nonword" neuron.
Is there some type of AI formalism where nonword recognition would be
problematic?
Richard Loosemore
-------------------------------------------
agi
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