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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 12

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Constance said:
Very interested in this link too and I'll pursue it. Speaking of Dreyfus, I came across a link last night to the following paper and wonder if you've read it. Can't find a pdf of it online yet.

Intelligence without representation – Merleau-Ponty's critique of mental representation The relevance of phenomenology to scientific explanation
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I think I finally understand this notion of intelligence without representation. It’s a bit like procedural knowledge versus semantic knowledge.

The following speaks to thoughts I’ve had in this regard:


If this paradigm shift is achieved, Brooks’ proposal for non-centralized cognition without representation appears promising for full-blown intelligent agents - though not for conscious agents and thus not for human-like AI.”

Ive always felt like this notion of intelligence without representation failed to account for human consciousness. But I see how it could account for intelligent behavior.
 
Soupie said:
I think I finally understand this notion of intelligence without representation. It’s a bit like procedural knowledge versus semantic knowledge.

The following speaks to thoughts I’ve had in this regard:


If this paradigm shift is achieved, Brooks’ proposal for non-centralized cognition without representation appears promising for full-blown intelligent agents - though not for conscious agents and thus not for human-like AI.”

Ive always felt like this notion of intelligence without representation failed to account for human consciousness. But I see how it could account for intelligent behavior.
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Yes: "knowing how vs knowing that"
 
smcder said:
medium.com

The World Is its Own Model or Why Hubert Dreyfus Is Still Right About AI

In Memoriam: Professor Hubert Dreyfus (1929–2017)
medium.com medium.com
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  • The brain should be understood as a complex sensory organ. Saying that the brain models the world is like saying that a sensor models what it senses. The brain builds a huge collection of specialized sensors that sense all sorts of phenomena in the world. The sensors are organized hierarchically. They are just sensors (detectors) that respond directly to specific sensory phenomena in the world. For example, we may have a high level sensor that fires when grandma comes into view but it is not a model of grandma. Our brain cannot model anything outside of it because our eyes do not see grandma. They just sense changes in illumination. To model something, one must have access to both a subject and an object. An artist can model something by looking at both the subject and the painting. The brain must sense things directly. It only has the signals from its senses to work with.”
 
Soupie said:
  • The brain should be understood as a complex sensory organ. Saying that the brain models the world is like saying that a sensor models what it senses. The brain builds a huge collection of specialized sensors that sense all sorts of phenomena in the world. The sensors are organized hierarchically. They are just sensors (detectors) that respond directly to specific sensory phenomena in the world. For example, we may have a high level sensor that fires when grandma comes into view but it is not a model of grandma. Our brain cannot model anything outside of it because our eyes do not see grandma. They just sense changes in illumination. To model something, one must have access to both a subject and an object. An artist can model something by looking at both the subject and the painting. The brain must sense things directly. It only has the signals from its senses to work with.”
Click to expand...

"The eyes do not see grandma." I find this daunting. I see I have to read this paper and others linked this last day or two by Dreyfus. Very promising for these long winter nights. :)
 
Soupie said:
Dennett is not a dualist.
The “should” is in reference to materialism. If one is making an argument logically congruent with materialism.
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There's a variety of models under the umbrella of materialism, and what seems to be happening is that various arguments make use of the specific models suited to their argument, which is fine if you want circular logic within a narrowly defined paradigm.
With all due respect ufology your know it all attitude and refusal to accept when you are confused/ignorant (re fundamental and emergent) is making it impossible to have a discussion with you.
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Simply because you don't agree with my perspective doesn't mean I'm confused or ignorant, and all that a discussion with me requires is content that is constructive and relevant. If you have a problem with that, then keep trying. It's good practice.
 
Constance said:
"The eyes do not see grandma." I find this daunting. I see I have to read this paper and others linked this last day or two by Dreyfus. Very promising for these long winter nights. :)
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@Constance: i don't see Dreyfus' paper except on Springer for $40...but there's a topic or category on philpapers that may be helpful...I'll do a different search and see if I can find something else by Dreyfus that might fill in this blank.

philpapers.org

AI without Representation? - Bibliography - PhilPapers

philpapers.org philpapers.org
 
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USI Calgary said:
There's a variety of models under the umbrella of materialism, and what seems to be happening is that various arguments make use of the specific models suited to their argument, which is fine if you want circular logic within a narrowly defined paradigm.

Simply because you don't agree with my perspective doesn't mean I'm confused or ignorant, and all that a discussion with me requires is content that is constructive and relevant. If you have a problem with that, then keep trying. It's good practice.
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Sure.
Please explain how Dennett is a dualist.
please explain how something can be emergent and fundamental simultaneously.
Please explain how a fundamental consciousness field fits in the materialist paradigm. Or fundamental consciousness quanta.
please explain how this fundamental consciousness field interacts with matter and energy to support your claim.
 
smcder said:
The first two, starting with "Machine Dreams" look like videos...am I looking at the right thing?
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Yes, that does seem to be the case. Looks like the is a series of 3 talks he gave which may be more substantive. I’ll check those out soon. In the meantime I messaged him on twitter asking if there are papers in which he explains his ideas in more depth.
I’ll read the Heidegger paper re no representations sooner than later.
as noted I can see how we might have intelligent behavior sans representations but I’m not yet seeing how we can have intentional consciousness sans representations.
 
Soupie said:
Yes, that does seem to be the case. Looks like the is a series of 3 talks he gave which may be more substantive. I’ll check those out soon. In the meantime I messaged him on twitter asking if there are papers in which he explains his ideas in more depth.
I’ll read the Heidegger paper re no representations sooner than later.
as noted I can see how we might have intelligent behavior sans representations but I’m not yet seeing how we can have intentional consciousness sans representations.
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Ok, I don't think the paper on Heideggerean AI is going to address that. :-(

Dreyfus' ideas on coping, if I remember, focus more on unconscious processes in terms of how we come to grips with the world.
 
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media.ccc.de - Playlist for "How to Build a Mind"

Video Streaming Portal des Chaos Computer Clubs
media.ccc.de media.ccc.de
An hour long talk. Only a few minutes in but already a few good nuggets. Interesting that he begins talking about AI with the mind.
we i gather from Dreyfus is that artificially intelligent t behavior (aib) can theoretically be achieved sans mind. It seems that Bach and others think true general ai will entail minds (and that minds entail models/representations).
this isn’t to say that a large part of human behavior isn’t governed by procedural knowledge. Just that true human-like intelligence will also include mind, understood as models/representations.
@smcder am I in the ballpark or way off.
sorry for the sloppy editing. The Paracast interface no longer likes my mobile device.
 
Soupie said:

media.ccc.de - Playlist for "How to Build a Mind"

Video Streaming Portal des Chaos Computer Clubs
media.ccc.de media.ccc.de
An hour long talk. Only a few minutes in but already a few good nuggets. Interesting that he begins talking about AI with the mind.
we i gather from Dreyfus is that artificially intelligent t behavior (aib) can theoretically be achieved sans mind. It seems that Bach and others think true general ai will entail minds (and that minds entail models/representations).
this isn’t to say that a large part of human behavior isn’t governed by procedural knowledge. Just that true human-like intelligence will also include mind, understood as models/representations.
@smcder am I in the ballpark or way off.
sorry for the sloppy editing. The Paracast interface no longer likes my mobile device.
Click to expand...

not sure ... I don't think Dreyfus thinks it works that way, and early AI was about procedural knowledge, Dreyfus thinks we don't have an internal representation of the world (some say the brain isn't big enough and would be too slow to work by models) and his (Dreyfus) interpretation of Heidegger is about coping, largely unconscious processes, for example the proper distance to stand from someone else is very different for a person from Japan and for an American - and what would be the procedural rules for a robot? And if you are put in a novel situation, how do you figure out where to stand?

Robots in GOFAI were really bad at this, well, much simpler problems like getting across a room (see "Shakey" the robot). Rodney Brooks ditched making maps, etc and had his "animats" respond in simple ways - detect objects ahead and respond - they could move around a room, but not sure they could "go across" the room on command ... and it's actually pretty tough even now to get a robot to go around a room and say vacuum your floors - some make maps as part of this process, some run zig zag patterns and make counts of turns using a probabilistic model of completion (and these vacuums may also run several times a week, so that over time, your floor stays relatively clean. but at any give time the while floor might not get covered), some detect dust as they run to figure out when the floor is clean and some robotic lawn mowers use buried wires in the yard as invisible barriers (with vacuums having similar technology indoors) and I think the best ones use all ... and still the manufacturers tell you this is to be though of more as a supplement to your normal vacuuming.

Which is not to say we don't have imagery and don't "represent" the world when thinking about things ... but it's very interesting to compare these "images" or "models" to the real thing and what relationship they bear to how we operate in the world. Even in something we think of as deliberative and conscious and well defined like chess - computers calculate ahead many many moves, humans recognize about 10,000 patterns - (similar to the number of chunks of knowledge any expert has in their field) and so they can play blindfolded and even multiple (I've heard up to eight games) at the same time - and yet I don't think this means they "see" the layout of all eight boards in their heads as they play.

I hope that helps.
 
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Conversation with Hubert L. Dreyfus, p. 6 of 8

Harry Kreisler interviews Hubert L. Dreyfus, Professor of Philosophy, UCB, on Meaning, Relevance, and the Limits of Technology; November 2005
globetrotter.berkeley.edu

"The way we have come at it, I realize something that I didn't realize, that What Computers Can't Do is a pretty strictly Heideggerian book, and that means it's mainly criticizing what people called mental representations, that people must have a model of the world in their mind in order to act intelligently, and that starts with Descartes. Then the computer people took it over, and now they talked about symbolic representations in the computer and they say -- Herbert Simon is the one who said it -- that we are physical symbol systems, people and computers both, because they each use representations and rules to make inferences about what's going on in the world and what to do about it. And that's what struck me as wrong, from a Heideggerian perspective, where we respond to the unique situation and we don't use rules."
 
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