Quick answer because in rush. Notice your "if" ... Which programs actually
do understand any *general* concepts of orientation? SHRDLU I will gladly
bet, didn't...and neither do any others.
What about the programs that control Stanley and the other DARPA Grand
Challenge vehicles?
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Tintner" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <agi@v2.listbox.com>
Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2008 11:24 AM
Subject: Re: [agi] Artificial humor
Jiri,
Quick answer because in rush. Notice your "if" ... Which programs actually
do understand any *general* concepts of orientation? SHRDLU I will gladly
bet, didn't...and neither do any others.
The v. word "orientation" indicates the reality that every picture has a
point of view, and refers to an observer. And there is no physical way
around that.
You have been seduced by an illusion - the illusion of the flat, printed
page, existing in a timeless space. And you have accepted implicitly that
there really is such a world - "flatland" - where geometry and geometrical
operations take place, utterly independent of you the viewer and
puppeteer, and the solid world of real objects to which they refer. It
demonstrably isn't true.
Remove your eyes from the page and walk around in the world - your room,
say. Hey, it's not flat...and neither are any of the objects in it.
Triangular objects in the world are different from triangles on the page,
fundamentally different.
But it is so difficult to shed yourself of this illusion. You need to
look at the history of culture and realise that the imposition on the
world/ environment of first geometrical figures, and then, more than a
thousand years later, the fixed point of view and projective geometry,
were - and remain - a SUPREME TRIUMPH OF THE HUMAN IMAGINATION. They
don't exist, Jiri. They're just one of many possible frameworks (albeit v
useful) to impose on the physical world. Nomadic tribes couldn't conceive
of squares and enclosed spaces. Future generations will invent new
frameworks.
Simple example of how persuasive the illusion is. I didn't understand
until yesterday what the "introduction of a fixed point of view" really
meant - it was that word "fixed". What was the big deal? I couldn't
understand. Isn't it a fact of life, almost?
Then it clicked. Your natural POV is "mobile" - your head/eyes keep
moving - even when reading. It is an artificial invention to posit a fixed
POV. And the geometric POV is doubly artificial, because it is "one-eyed",
no?, not stereoscopic. But once you get used to reading pages/screens you
come to assume that an artificial fixed POV is *natural*.
[Stan Franklin was interested in a speculative paper suggesting that the
evolutionary brain's "stabilisation of vision", (a software triumph
because organisms are so mobile) may have led to the development of
consciousness).
You have to understand the difference between 1) the page, or medium, and
2) the real world it depicts, and 3) you, the observer, reading/looking
at the page. Your idea of AGI is just one big page [or screen] that
apparently exists in splendid self-contained isolation.
It's an illusion, and it just doesn't *work* vis-a-vis programs. Do you
want to cling to "excessive optimism" and a simple POV or do you want to
try and grasp the admittedly complicated & more sophisticated reality?
.
Jiri: If you talk to a program about changing 3D scene and the program
then
correctly answers questions about [basic] spatial relationships
between the objects then I would say it understands 3D. Of course the
program needs to work with a queriable 3D representation but it
doesn't need a "body". I mean it doesn't need to be a real-world
robot, it doesn't need to associate "self" with any particular 3D
object (real-world or simulated) and it doesn't need to be self-aware.
It just needs to be the 3D-scene-aware and the scene may contain just
a few basic 3D objects (e.g. the Shrdlu stuff).
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agi
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