Dear John,
My comments are below,
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F Sowa
Sent: Tuesday, November 26, 2013 11:00 AM
To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [ontolog-forum] Biologically
inspired cognitive architecture (wasSemantic Dementia)
I changed the subject line to
emphasize some issues that have been
debated in AI for over half a
century: Since digital computers are
so radically different from the human
brain, does it make any sense
to imitate or even waste time by
studying neural mechanisms?
A typical analogy is to airplanes,
which do not flap their wings.
Actually, helicopters twirl their wings, only
a slight difference from biological equivalents such as humming birds or
flies. But yes, the engines we produce can only generate either
rotational or translational forces in part because they are made of relatively
inflexible materials. So our mechanical technology is very different from
biological technologies we see around us.
But that analogy is misleading:
The major reason for the Wright
brothers' success is that they
studied how birds control their
flight by bending the shape of their
wings. So they invented
"wing warping" to control
the flight of their airplanes.
The way I heard it was that Bernoulli’s
equations played the significant role of suggesting two paths of air travel
over a wing and under it having a slight difference in length. The way of
least air resistance is to bend one side of the wing more than you bend the
other side of the wing. That, in effects due to PV=nrT, leads to a force
at right angle to the wing. Up if you design it to be so.
As a result, the Wright brothers
astounded the world by flying
around Paris while the others could only fly in a
straight line.
John, I think you must mean someone else
besides the Wrights. They did their demonstration at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina
due to the stead wind and the soft sand dunes which make crashing easier.
By the others who “could only fly in a straight line” above, do you
mean the dirigibles and balloon crafts of that day?
Moral: You can get a lot of
insight from analyzing and reverse-
engineering systems that successfully
do what you're trying to do.
But you don't have to imitate or
simulate every detail.
Yes, its just the first moment of an
inspiration that keeps you thinking of the original stimulus. After that,
you can connect up one concept on top of another until you figure out how to
keep it all standing. That produces your inspired new concept. Then
the hard work starts of trying to tear it all apart until it becomes tried and
tested.
On 11/22/2013 5:15 PM, Rich Cooper wrote:
> Thanks for the reference to the
slides; it's useful to know
> how many brain regions are
associated with behavioral properties,
> especially linguistic behaviors.
This is an area where some
"inspiration" from neuroscience can
provide guidance. Jerry Fodor,
for example, claimed that there
is a "language of thought"
in the brain, which is translated to
and from spoken languages. As
evidence, many of our thoughts are
a kind of "inner speech"
that resembles our spoken language.
Agreed. See that email conversation
on this list some time ago when Pat Hayes and I discussed our personal experiences
wrt the inner conversation. Based on that conversation, I’ve
slightly revised my way of internal thinking to include vision and sound more broadly.
That is probably what led me to the paper on Semantic Dementia in the first
place.
But slide 27 from
http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/goal2.pdf (and
the slides that precede and follow
it) show the way language is
assembled in Broca's area from
information scattered around
many areas of the brain. Some
implications:
1. Don't expect to find
anything that resembles a language of
thought or a
unified "logical form" in the brain.
Nor expect much outside of it
either.
2. The so-called "inner
speech" is not the basis for speech.
Instead,
it's generated by the same processes that generate
audible
speech -- but with inhibition of the final step.
Doesn’t that inhibition or
enablement mean that inner speech actually IS the basis for speech? In a
purely engineering sense, if you can turn the sound on or off, you only have
added one bit of information to the signal that is already there inside the
brain. Isn’t that signal the “inner speech”? It
seems to me that the inner speech is created as the ego’s response to his
environment. It is based on what his emotions and senses provide as
inputs. It is also based on the “state”, comprised of stored
knowledge of experiences in various modalities that can be remembered in his
present environment. Based on all this material, ego chooses what to do
next. It is the retrieved memory with selected substitutions that the ego
chooses, in my opinion. That is what generates outer speech.
3. Minsky's _Society of Mind_
with its multiple heterogeneous
modules or
agents is a more realistic alternative. See
slides 33 to
36 of http://www.jfsowa.com/goal5.pdf
Yes, but don’t know Minsky’s
email so I can’t chat with him about it.
4. These observations don't
mean that logic is irrelevant for AI.
But they show
that logic is one among many useful methods used
by people
and computer systems. See slide 32 of goal5.pdf.
5. It's also instructive to
compare slide 32 of goal5.pdf to
slides 37
and 38 of goal2.pdf. None of these diagrams
influenced
the others, but the similarities are remarkable.
James Albus, who drew diagrams that I
combined in slide 38, was
a computer scientist who designed
successful robotics systems
that were inspired by his study of
neuroscience. For a summary,
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_S._Albus#Work
.
John
Thanks, and a Happy Thanksgiving to All
Ontologists and Antiontologists alike,
-Rich