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Re: Cyc

#151

Post by yters »

perl4ever wrote: post #134
yters wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the secret sauce that makes intelligence, the kind that invents AI, is consciousness? I, at least, certainly do a lot of conscious thinking when I solve problems, as opposed to unconscious thinking :)

"I, at least, certainly do a lot of conscious thinking when I solve problems" That jumps out at me, because I do a lot of "unconscious thinking" to solve problems and I feel like I've read where other people describe similar experiences. Besides the cliche of solving problems in your sleep, I sometimes have an experience where consciously focusing on solving a problem leads to a blind alley, and distracting my consci…

I've never solved a problem while completely unconscious. I've occasionally had insights while dreaming, and there is some intuitive aspect to thought that is difficult or impossible to explicitly articulate. But, every instance of problem solving I engage in is connected with conscious thought.

Re: Cyc

#152

Post by yters »

perl4ever wrote: post #133
yters wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. No I don't. I don't have to explain how gravity works to know that it does and make scientific claims about its operation. Likewise, I can scientifically demonstrate the mind is non physical and interacts with our physical world without explaining how. 2. If the world is not physically closed then physical theory and natural laws are not violated, since they would not apply to anything beyond the physical world. 3…

Explaining how gravity works doesn't tell you whether gravity itself is a real thing, whether it is metaphysical, whether it's an epiphenomena of something else. People talk about it being curvature in spacetime vs. a force, but we're just reifying the math, right? And I don't think we have a completely firm grasp on what is possible computationally with a given amount of physical resources, given the development of…

The metaphysics are unimportant. The important question as far as AGI is concerned is whether human intelligence is physically computable. And quantum computation is less powerful than non deterministic Turing computation. So, we can bound quantum computation with NTMs.

Re: Cyc

#153

Post by inimino »

yters wrote: post #149
inimino wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> physicalism does imply computationalism That's not true either. There are plenty of materialists who think the universe is not computable, thus it's totally possible to believe that the mind is not computable despite being entirely physical.

It's possible, so I should qualify it as our current understanding of physics implies computationalism. So, if a macro phenomena, i.e. the human mind, is uncomputable, then it is not emergent from the low computable physical substrate.

If the mind were found to be uncomputable, I think you'd find vastly more physicists would take that as evidence the universe is uncomputable than that the mind is nonphysical.

Re: Cyc

#154

Post by inimino »

yters wrote: post #150
inimino wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the mind were a halting oracle I don't think most of our open problems in mathematics would be.

It's possible for the mind to solve more halting problems than any finite computer, yet still not be as powerful as a complete halting oracle. Thus, the fact we haven't solved every problem does not count as evidence against the mind being a halting oracle.

Actually it does. While it's logically possible, evidence for a hypothesis A is still provided by any data that is more likely under hypothesis A than under hypothesis B.

The hypothesis that the mind is computable but is using heuristics, of various levels of sophistication, explains the data better and is more parsimonious than your hypothesis, because we already have reason to believe that the mind uses heuristics extensively.

Where you see uncomputable oracular insights, others see computable combinations of heuristics. If you introspect deeply enough while problem-solving, you may be able to sense the heuristics working prior to the flash of intuition.

Re: Cyc

#155

Post by ericjang »

catpolice wrote: post #99
Rerarom wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Do you think it's possible that Cyc would lead to AGI? 2) Do you think it's possible that Cyc would lead to AI advances that are impressive to the layman like AlphaGo or GPT-2?

These answers are very personal to me. I joined Cycorp because Doug Lenat sold me on it being a more viable path toward something like AGI than I had suspected when I read about it. I left for a number of reasons (e.g. just to pursue other projects) but a big one was slowly coming to doubt that. I could be sold on the idea that Cyc or something Cyc-like could be a piece of the puzzle for AGI. I say "Cyc-like" because…

Thank you for this AMA, it was eye opening and made me think a lot about the organizational/tech debt barriers to creating AGI (or creating an organization that can create AGI).

I'm a ML researcher working on Deep Learning for robotics. I'm skeptical of the symbolic approach by which 1) ontologists manually enter symbolic assertions and 2) the system deduces further things from its existing ontology. My skepticism comes from a position of Slavic pessimism: we don't actually know how to formally define any object, much less ontological relationships between objects. If we let a machine use our garbage ontologies as axioms with which to prove further ontological relationships, the resulting ontology may be completely disjoint from the reality we live in. There must be a forcing function with which reality tells the system that its ontology is incorrect, and a mechanism for unwinding wrong ontologies.

I'm reminded of a quote from the Alien, Covenant movie.

Walter : When one note is off, it eventually destroys the whole symphony, David.

Re: Cyc

#156

Post by yters »

inimino wrote: post #153
yters wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible, so I should qualify it as our current understanding of physics implies computationalism. So, if a macro phenomena, i.e. the human mind, is uncomputable, then it is not emergent from the low computable physical substrate.

If the mind were found to be uncomputable, I think you'd find vastly more physicists would take that as evidence the universe is uncomputable than that the mind is nonphysical.

So they may, but that would not follow logically. If the lowest level of physics is all computable then the higher physical levels must also be computable. Thus, if a higher level is not computable, it is not physical. We have never found anything at the lowest level that is not computable. None of it is even at the level of a Turing machine, unlike human produced computers.

Re: Cyc

#157

Post by perl4ever »

yters wrote: post #151
perl4ever wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I, at least, certainly do a lot of conscious thinking when I solve problems" That jumps out at me, because I do a lot of "unconscious thinking" to solve problems and I feel like I've read where other people describe similar experiences. Besides the cliche of solving problems in your sleep, I sometimes have an experience where consciously focusing on solving a problem leads to a blind alley, and distracting my consci…

I've never solved a problem while completely unconscious. I've occasionally had insights while dreaming, and there is some intuitive aspect to thought that is difficult or impossible to explicitly articulate. But, every instance of problem solving I engage in is connected with conscious thought.

I don't know what "completely unconscious" means, but it doesn't sound like what I was describing.

I think I agree that my problem solving is connected with conscious thought, but the heavy lifting is mostly (or at least frequently) done by something that "I" am not aware of in detail.

When someone is explaining something complicated, pretty often, maybe not always, my (conscious) mind is pretty blank. I can say "yeah, I'm following you", but I feel like I'm not. Then when I start working on it, I feel like I am fumbling around for the keys to unlock some background processing that was happening in the meantime.

Also, when I am in a state where I am consciously writing something elaborate, and I feel connected to the complex concepts behind it, sometimes I get stuck in a blind alley. My context seems too narrow, and often I can get unstuck by just doing something unrelated to distract my conscious mind, like browsing news on my phone and then it's like a stuck process was terminated and I realize what I need to change on a higher level of abstraction.

It's possible I have some sort of inherent disability that I am compensating for by using a different part of my brain than normal, I suppose.

Re: Cyc

#158

Post by inimino »

yters wrote: post #156
inimino wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the mind were found to be uncomputable, I think you'd find vastly more physicists would take that as evidence the universe is uncomputable than that the mind is nonphysical.

So they may, but that would not follow logically. If the lowest level of physics is all computable then the higher physical levels must also be computable. Thus, if a higher level is not computable, it is not physical. We have never found anything at the lowest level that is not computable. None of it is even at the level of a Turing machine, unlike human produced computers.

Any chaotic system (highly sensitive to initial conditions) is practically uncomputable for us, because we have neither the computational power nor the ability to measure the initial conditions sufficiently accurately. Whether there is some lowest level at which everything is quantized, or it's real numbers all the way down, is an open question.

I don't think your argument will seem compelling to anyone who doesn't already have a strong prior belief that the mind is non-physical.

Re: Cyc

#160

Post by choamnomsky »

The_rationalist wrote: post #142
choamnomsky wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also a Cycorp employee, so I can say a little bit at least about (1) and (2). 1) We often use HOL. CycL isn't restricted to first order logic and we often reason by quantifying over predicates. 2) I don't know where you could read an explanation of it, other than the general problem that NLU is hard. It is something people at the company are interested in, though, and some of us think Cyc can play a big role in N…

Thanks. BTW, do you use some formal linguistic theories such as the ones from Noam chomsky?

I wouldn't say that we feel beholden to particular theories, but some of us have backgrounds in linguistics and we draw on those.
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