Re: [agi] (video)The Future of Cognitive Computing
On Mon, Jan 22, 2007 at 05:26:43PM -0800, Matt Mahoney wrote: > The issues of consciousness have been discussed on the singularity list. > These are hard questions. I'm not sure questions about anything as ill-defined as consciousness are meaningful. > - If your brain was scanned and backed up to disk, would you still be > conscious after you die? Throught is a process, and a static image has only the potential for a process, if it's being resumed at some point. > - Does a thermostat want to keep the room at a constant temperature, or does > it only behave as if that is what it wants? (Ask this question about human > behavior). I don't understand your question. It depends on your definition of "want". > - Do you control your own thoughts, or is your brain a computer whose outputs > are predictable given its inputs and internal state? Even a deterministic process is not necessarily predictable, if you're lacking information and means of prediction. You seem to be rewording the "free will vs. determinism" pseudodichotomy. A behaving robot can't predict anything about its internal state. It lacks both information about its future input (assuming nontrivial environment, which is the only environment worth making), information about its internal state (full information cannot be represented by the system) and by trying to predict it necessarily changes its own state, making the attempt utterly futile. People are not even deterministic systems, being nonlinear and noisy physical system, so the question needs to be unasked. > The questions are hard because humans (and other animals) are programmed > through evolution to fear death and to believe in free will (ability to > control ones thoughts and the environment). Those animals that behaved > differently did not propagate their DNA. I assume you would want to program > an AGI to behave as if it believed in its own consciousness. If you just use survival as a fitness trait that's implicit. > I don't expect to convince anyone, even myself, that consciousness does not > exist. Such a belief could be fatal, if it were even possible. What is consciousness? That word probably means for me something else than for you, or anyone else in the room. > That said, I think it does not matter whether an AGI is created by copying > someone's brain or by modeling the child develpmental process and training. > Either way the result is an approximation of a human. But the moral issue > does not go away. The question of whether such a thing should have human > rights puts us in deep conflict with our own biological programming. Rights are behavioural algorithms, co-evolved in many interaction rounds among roughly equal players. By the time artificial systems need rights, they will be not granted, but the systems will assert their rights. If needed, rather forcefully. -- Eugen* Leitl http://leitl.org";>leitl http://leitl.org __ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303 signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: [agi] About the brain-emulation route to AGI
On Mon, Jan 22, 2007 at 06:43:08PM -0800, Matt Mahoney wrote: > I think AGI will be solved when computer scientists, psychologists, and > neurologists work together to solve the problem with a combination of > computer, human, and animal experiments. I agree. (Though I would just put computational neuroscientists and neuroscientists in your list. Psychology is too high-level to be a useful source of constraints). -- Eugen* Leitl http://leitl.org";>leitl http://leitl.org __ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303 signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: [agi] Project proposal: MindPixel 2
Given my experience while employed at Cycorp, I would say that there are two ways to work with them. The first way is to collaborate with Cycorp on a sponsored project. Collaborators are mainly universities (e.g. CMU & Stanford) and established research companies (e.g. SRI & SAIC) who have a track record of receiving government grants, and whose technologies are complementary to Cyc. I would not suggest this approach for MindPixel 2 yet. The second approach involves no exchange of money. Cycorp wants to promote its ontology - its commonsense vocabulary, and has released its definitions with a very permisive license as OpenCyc. One can also obtain nearly the entire Cyc knowledge base with a Research Cyc license for research purposes without fee, but with the RCyc license you are not allowed to extract facts and rules for MindPixel 2. You could contact the Cyc Foundation, which is an independent organization run by a friend of mine and former Cycorp employee. They are seeking to add knowledge to Cyc by using volunteers and I believe that they would be very receptive to MindPixel 2 provided it uses a form of the OpenCyc vocabulary for knowledge representation. I suggest obtaining an RCyc license to see how the Cyc inference engine handles large rule and fact sets, and to see if the Cyc vocabulary fits your idea of a commonsense representation language. - Original Message From: Benjamin Goertzel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Friday, January 19, 2007 5:35:51 PM Subject: Re: [agi] Project proposal: MindPixel 2 Hi, > Do you think Cyc has a rule/fact like "wet things can usually conduct > electricity" (or "if X is wet then X may conduct electricity")? Yes, it does... > I'll also contact some Cyc folks to see if they're interested in > collaborating... IMO, to have any chance of interesting them, you will need to be able to explain to them VERY CLEARLY why your current proposed approach is superior to theirs -- given that it seems so philosophically similar to theirs, and given that they have already encoded millions of knowledge items and built an inference engine and language-processing front end! -- Ben G - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303 Get your own web address. Have a HUGE year through Yahoo! Small Business. http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/domains/?p=BESTDEAL - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] Project proposal: MindPixel 2
I'm no expert on automated reasoning, but wasn't the original Mindpixel based fundamentally upon probabilistic representations (coherence values) whereas Cyc, from what I understand, doesn't represent facts or rules probabilistically. - Bob On 23/01/07, Stephen Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Given my experience while employed at Cycorp, I would say that there are two ways to work with them. The first way is to collaborate with Cycorp on a sponsored project. Collaborators are mainly universities (e.g. CMU & Stanford) and established research companies (e.g. SRI & SAIC) who have a track record of receiving government grants, and whose technologies are complementary to Cyc. I would not suggest this approach for MindPixel 2 yet. The second approach involves no exchange of money. Cycorp wants to promote its ontology - its commonsense vocabulary, and has released its definitions with a very permisive license as OpenCyc. One can also obtain nearly the entire Cyc knowledge base with a Research Cyc license for research purposes without fee, but with the RCyc license you are not allowed to extract facts and rules for MindPixel 2. You could contact the Cyc Foundation, which is an independent organization run by a friend of mine and former Cycorp employee. They are seeking to add knowledge to Cyc by using volunteers and I believe that they would be very receptive to MindPixel 2 provided it uses a form of the OpenCyc vocabulary for knowledge representation. I suggest obtaining an RCyc license to see how the Cyc inference engine handles large rule and fact sets, and to see if the Cyc vocabulary fits your idea of a commonsense representation language. - Original Message From: Benjamin Goertzel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Friday, January 19, 2007 5:35:51 PM Subject: Re: [agi] Project proposal: MindPixel 2 Hi, > Do you think Cyc has a rule/fact like "wet things can usually conduct > electricity" (or "if X is wet then X may conduct electricity")? Yes, it does... > I'll also contact some Cyc folks to see if they're interested in > collaborating... IMO, to have any chance of interesting them, you will need to be able to explain to them VERY CLEARLY why your current proposed approach is superior to theirs -- given that it seems so philosophically similar to theirs, and given that they have already encoded millions of knowledge items and built an inference engine and language-processing front end! -- Ben G - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303 Get your own web address. Have a HUGE year through Yahoo! Small Business. http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/domains/?p=BESTDEAL - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303 - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] About the brain-emulation route to AGI
Eugen, > So you're engaging in a critique of a field you know very > little about. If you can't express yourself without gratuitous sarcasm and allegations like the above, you'll just be ignored. In fact, you misunderstood pretty much everything I tried to say, so it would have been a huge amount of work for me to sort out the mess. I suppose I should thank you for being so rude that I don't need to bother. ;-) Richard Loosemore. Eugen Leitl wrote: On Mon, Jan 22, 2007 at 01:11:57PM -0500, Richard Loosemore wrote: This debate about the relative merits of the AGI and the Brain Emulation methods of building an intelligence seems confused to me. What is the Brain Emulation method? Are you talking about computational neuroscience, or something? What exactly is meant by a "brain emulation" route anyway? I'm not entirely sure (I haven't read it all yet), but the very beginning of this post strikes me as a desperate search for a strawman to demolish. Is it: A) Copy the exact structure and functioning of the brain's hardware, and along the way get a precise understanding of the functional architecture of the human brain, at all the various levels at which such an architecture needs to be understood. or B) Copy the exact structure and functioning of the brain's hardware, but ignore the architecture. ? Why do you think these are mutually exclusive alternatives? What makes you think there is such a thing as architecture in the human sense sitting in there for you to copy a blueprint from? An illustration of the difference: You know nothing about electronics, but you get hold of an extremely complex radio, and want to build one by exactly "emulating" your example. Do you try to do your emulation Um, wrong comparison. CNS doesn't require any new physics. Some approaches start with atomically accurate models of compartments, which allows you to reach down to arbitrary low level of theory in order to fetch missing parameters. That's bottom up. Simultaneously, you have top-down empirical data from neuron and tissue activity. You can use both to eliminate the large but shrinking amount of unknown in the middle. without ever trying to understand the functions of transistors? The Do you think that an atomically accurate copy of a radio wouldn't work? functions of all the various hardware components? The general idea of transmission of radio signals? The modular structure of the radio set, But the brain is not a radio set. Specifically, it's not a human-designed artifact, and has different signatures. with its tuning, frequency multiplexing, amplitude demodulation and other circuits? Do you ignore the functioning of the radio with respect to the humans who use it? The existence and distribution of radio signal sources? I don't understand your last two sentences. (In fact, I was going huh? at a rate of about twice every sentence so far, but deconstructing your post at this level would do no good so I won't). You could decide to care about all that stuff - that would be Route A - or you could ignore it and just emulate the thing by brute force, cubic micrometer by cubic micrometer - that would be Route B. Of course some people do A, and some do B, and several others go for C and D. I presume that the brain emulation community is not being so daft as to try B but honestly, when I read people talking about this, they Actually, it is not at all daft to model a cubic micron or so of biology from first principles, if you can extract nonobservable parameters (such as a switching behaviour of a particular ion channel type, for instance) from a MD level simulation. Have you ever considered how to write a learning simulation that ascends, by incrementally building upper abstraction layers, and co-evolving hardware representation as it goes along? It's certainly demanding, but not nearly as demanding as a full-blown AGI by explicit coding. often seem to be assuming a black and white division between A and B, and more often than not they ARE assuming that what "brain emulation" means is B - the dumb brute force method. Maybe you're reading the wrong people. Or, misunderstand what they say. I have to say that if B is what is meant, the idea seems insane. You only need to get one little transistor junction out of place in your simulation of the radio, and the entire thing might not work ... and if you know nothing about the functionality, you are up the proverbial creek. Ditto for the brain. The brain is not a radio. It's designed to work in a noisy environment, so it's autohomeostating. You don't have to tune the oscillator precision down to ppb levels in order for it to work, or break down horribly. How many errors can you afford to make before the brain simulation becomes just as useless as a broken radio? The point is WHO KNOWS?! It Of course injecting errors into the simulation and look at trajectory sp
Re: [agi] Project proposal: MindPixel 2
Right, Cyc's deductive inference engine does not support probabilistic reasoning. But there is no obstacle to extending Cyc's probabilistic vocabulary for the particular representation you want and then using an inference engine of your own design. For my AGI project I use the OpenCyc vocabulary and content, but with my own object store (a relational database) and simple inference (look-up and subsumption within contexts). The java dialog application that I am building does not require any more sophisticated deduction, so I postponing any complex inference until I can teach those algorithms to the system using English. -Steve http://sf.net/projects/texai - Original Message From: Bob Mottram <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2007 1:13:14 PM Subject: Re: [agi] Project proposal: MindPixel 2 I'm no expert on automated reasoning, but wasn't the original Mindpixel based fundamentally upon probabilistic representations (coherence values) whereas Cyc, from what I understand, doesn't represent facts or rules probabilistically. - Bob On 23/01/07, Stephen Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Given my experience while employed at Cycorp, I would say that there are two ways to work with them. The first way is to collaborate with Cycorp on a sponsored project. Collaborators are mainly universities (e.g. CMU & Stanford) and established research companies ( e.g. SRI & SAIC) who have a track record of receiving government grants, and whose technologies are complementary to Cyc. I would not suggest this approach for MindPixel 2 yet. The second approach involves no exchange of money. Cycorp wants to promote its ontology - its commonsense vocabulary, and has released its definitions with a very permisive license as OpenCyc. One can also obtain nearly the entire Cyc knowledge base with a Research Cyc license for research purposes without fee, but with the RCyc license you are not allowed to extract facts and rules for MindPixel 2. You could contact the Cyc Foundation, which is an independent organization run by a friend of mine and former Cycorp employee. They are seeking to add knowledge to Cyc by using volunteers and I believe that they would be very receptive to MindPixel 2 provided it uses a form of the OpenCyc vocabulary for knowledge representation. I suggest obtaining an RCyc license to see how the Cyc inference engine handles large rule and fact sets, and to see if the Cyc vocabulary fits your idea of a commonsense representation language. - Original Message From: Benjamin Goertzel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Friday, January 19, 2007 5:35:51 PM Subject: Re: [agi] Project proposal: MindPixel 2 Hi, > Do you think Cyc has a rule/fact like "wet things can usually conduct > electricity" (or "if X is wet then X may conduct electricity")? Yes, it does... > I'll also contact some Cyc folks to see if they're interested in > collaborating... IMO, to have any chance of interesting them, you will need to be able to explain to them VERY CLEARLY why your current proposed approach is superior to theirs -- given that it seems so philosophically similar to theirs, and given that they have already encoded millions of knowledge items and built an inference engine and language-processing front end! -- Ben G - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303 Get your own web address. Have a HUGE year through Yahoo! Small Business. http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/domains/?p=BESTDEAL - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303 This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303 Do you Yahoo!? Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail beta. http://new.mail.yahoo.com - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] (video)The Future of Cognitive Computing
--- Eugen Leitl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Mon, Jan 22, 2007 at 05:26:43PM -0800, Matt Mahoney wrote: > > > The issues of consciousness have been discussed on the singularity list. > These are hard questions. > > I'm not sure questions about anything as ill-defined as consciousness > are meaningful. The question arises when we need to make moral decisions, such as is it moral to upload a human brain into software, then manipulate that data in arbitrary ways, e.g. simulate pain? I think consciousness is poorly defined because any attempt to define it leads to the conclusion that it does not exist. You know what consciousness is, but try to define it. 1. Consciousness is the little person in your head that observes everything you sense and decides everything you do. 2. Consciousness (or self awareness) is what makes you different than everyone else. 3. Consciousness is what makes the world today different than before you were born. 4. If an exact copy of you was made, atom for atom, replicating all of your memories and behavior, then the only distinction between you and your copy would be that you have a consciousness. But with any of these definitions, it becomes clear that there is no physical justification for consciousness. You believe that other people have consciousnesses because you know that you do, and others are like you. But there is no way to know for sure. How do you distinguish between a person who has self awareness and one who only behaves as if he or she does? Perhaps we can drop the insistence that consciousness exists. Then a possible definition would be any behavior consistent with a belief in self awareness or free will. But this has problems too. > > - Does a thermostat want to keep the room at a constant temperature, or > does it only behave as if that is what it wants? (Ask this question about > human behavior). > > I don't understand your question. It depends on your definition > of "want". I mean that if an agent has goal directed behavior, then it behaves as if it "wants" to satisfy its goals. I use this example to show that goal directed behavior is not a criteria for consciousness. Do animals have consciousness? Does an embryo? These questions are controversial. AGI will raise new controversies. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
[agi] "10 Questions for György Buzsáki "
Begin forwarded message: From: Damien Broderick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: January 23, 2007 3:37:32 PM EST To: "'ExI chat list'" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [extropy-chat] "10 Questions for György Buzsáki " Reply-To: ExI chat list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/01/10-questions-for-gyki.php interesting interview e.g.: 6. Your discussion of the brain's first rhythm could make one feel that we are close to understanding when meaningful cognition begins. Does your knowledge of EEG patterns and their underpinnings influence your thinking about beginning-of-life, end-of-life, or even animal rights debates? I believe that cognition begins once the 1/f features of cortical rhythms emerge because this dynamics represents global (i.e., distributed) computation and only structures with these features appear to generate conscious experience. The ontogenetic appearance of 1/f dynamics coincides with the emergence of long-range cortico-cortical projections. In the newborn human the 1/f global feature of the EEG is already present. On the other hand, in preterm babies, depending on the gestation age, long seconds of neuronal silence alternate with short, spatially localized oscillatory bursts (known as "delta brush"), like in sharks and lizards. These localized intermittent cortical patterns in the premature brain, and similar ones in the strictly locally organized adult cerebellum, cannot give rise to conscious awareness, no matter the size. From this perspective, the structure-function relations between the small world network-like features of the cerebral cortex and the resultant global rhythms appear as necessary conditions for awareness. Earlier developmental stages without these properties simply do not have the necessary ingredients of the product we call cognition. ___ extropy-chat mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
