Richard Loosemore wrote:
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
Richard,
You seem to have decided my request for comment was about word (mis)recognition.
It wasn't. Unfortunately, I included a misleading example in my initial post.
A couple of list members called me on it immediately (I'd expect nothing less
from this group -- and this was a valid criticism duly noted). So far, three
people have pointed out that a query containing an un-common (foreign, slang or
both) word is one way to quickly generate the "feeling of not knowing." But, it
is just that: only one way. Not all "feelings of not knowing" are produced by
linguistic analysis of surface features. In fact, I would guess that the vast
majority of them are not so generated. Still, some are and pointing this out
was a valid contribution (perhaps that example was fortunately bad).
I don't think my query is a no-brainer to answer (unless you want to make it
one) and your response, since it contained only another "flavor" of the previous
two responses, gives me no reason whatsoever to change my opinion.
Please take a look at the revised example in this thread. I don't think it has
the same problems (as an example) as did the initial example. In particular,
all of the words are common (American English) and the syntax is valid.
Cheers,
Brad
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