Kids learn faster than adults because their brains form faster. Adults can think while kids can remember better. Our brains have a part that does all the automatic stuff for us. I've see a tv program where one part of brain invaded the other I think and it made the guy feel his left cheek and arm that he no longer had. He had to put a mirror to see his reflected hand and trick his brain into thinking he had two hands. Interesting program.

Anyways, we must extract the essence of human AI and if it turns out that it's just a combo of zillion neurons and delicate web of structure then we're screwed for now since we don't have technology to replicate it. But if it turns out that this isn't so then we have a shot at it today. Perhaps with using a compression technique for structure and data flow? Who knows? I do know that it's not some black box in our brains because when we get drunk it effects all brain functions ie. the chemical interaction between neurons exchanging info. This is the perfect opportunity for us to think outside the box if we want to pursue some kind of an AI with current tech.

Also, what effect if any our DNA has on our brain? Does it tell how brain should be structured or does it do something more we're not aware of? But yeah, going beyond our biological brains to simulate AI could be difficult but it might be possible. It would be probably simpler to simulate our brains first? Discuss.... :)

I would say that the concept of Intelligence is apart from the Environment that that Intelligence inhabits.

The necessities of the environment shape the internal organizational structures of a being's Nervous System (NS).

This doesn't mean a being's Nervous System isnt tightly adapted to a certain environment.

In regards to AI, I belive they will be able to perceive the environment as we do, understand the feelings we mean when we describe tree bark, although the internal mechanics of their NS might be completely diferent.

I would also like to throw out there that a human being's Nervous System isnt just his brain. To a degree or other we can almost say that almost all of a human's cells are adapative, and therefore perform a neural-like behavior, therefore I see much of the body as a potential structure that also inflicts weight in our conscious selfs and decisions.

In opposition to an AI, where the only NS is its brain, almost all of a living being's physical structure is reactant to the environment.

That is possibly the thing that will seperate us more from AI, imho.

So we agree that the shaping of the brain, its size and capacity for what it can do is influenced by the environment. But, what is the essence or the brain foundation that allows the brain to expand and become better? I would like to extract that from the brain then build a machine based on it. Maybe this essence doesn't have to be formed like our brains. Perhaps we can obtain the same effect in different way, one that we haven't thought about yet.

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Original post by JD Kids learn faster than adults because their brains form faster.

I'd be interested to look at any references you have as I've seen no evidence from the literature to support this statement. Of course, I certainly haven't read everything ever written ;) My paediatric neurophysiology knowledge is limited but I don't believe that kids brain tissue grows any faster than adult brain tissue, it's just that the mechanisms for growth have been switched off by the time a person becomes an adult.

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Original post by JD Adults can think while kids can remember better.

Actually, infants have a very poor memory system. They have very little long term memory and only a small working memory. They do have, as adults do, mechanisms for learning autonomic functions. Memory develops with experience. If you're actually saying that children are better at encoding autonomic function than adults... that's possible but I don't think probable.

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Our brains have a part that does all the automatic stuff for us.

I believe you're thinking of the cerebellum, which encodes many autonomic functions. However, the elements of the mid-brain and spinal column also control autonomous function.

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Anyways, we must extract the essence of human AI

Trying to understand and recreate human intelligence is only one of the approaches to AI. The other main stream of research lies in trying to understand intelligence (any intelligence, not just human) from the computational point of view.

Cheers,

Timkin

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Original post by Timkin Okay... here are some of my surface thoughts on understanding. Feel free to pick them apart and expose the flaws. I'd certainly enjoy refining my ideas. ;)

Always a pleasure in helping people refine their thoughts. Exactly why I posted mine in the first place.

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Original post by Timkin I'm trying to convince myself that one can understand something without having experienced it, which would mean that understanding and experience are only correlated, rather than causally related (and computers could understand trees). We have the ability to learn by analogy, so in principle we should be able to gain understanding by analogy.

I would not describe this as learning without experience. You must have a domain of experience with the world and your understanding of the abstracted, communicated ideas are based in that domain of experience. It might not contain the actual phenomenon you're learning about, but your understanding will be limited to the phenomena you've already experienced.

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Original post by Timkin For those that would say that without the experience there is no understanding, then by deduction I would say that you believe that withouth qualia, there is no understanding. An interesting notion which fits with Mike's thought that understanding is subjective. So is qualia the key to understanding or is it just a fancy Latin word for observation and the internal processes generated by observation.

My opinion is that there are no qualia, no ingrained characteristics of anything. Qualia being defined at dictionary.com as "A property, such as whiteness, considered independently from things having that property." There are no property separate from things. In fact there are no properties separate from an observer's interaction with a thing (observing being an interaction).

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Original post by Timkin Put aside for the moment the issue of fluency and assume that both a toddler and an adult learning Chinese know the same limited set of characters and have the same vocabulary and understanding of grammar in Chinese. Does the adult understand Chinese any less than the child, or vice versa? I don't think so, since both could presumably use their limited vocabularly to interact with each other and other Chinese speakers. This would suggest that the difference in experiences of the child and adult does not result in a different understanding of Chinese.

I would still argue that the child and the adult (or, let's make them more generic and call them individal A and individual B) have different understanding in precisely the way that their physiology, and interaction of that physiology with their environment, differ. If A has seen three trees of different types or, indeed, three different trees or the same three trees from different angles or at different times of day from B, then they have qualitatively different experiences of trees, even if they are identical twins who have had identical experiences up until that point. That they can communicate is true, but think about the level of communication. They only communicate over the symbol "tree" insofar as their experiences of "tree" share similarities. These similarities may be qualitatively very, very similar, but there will always be a necessary difference (given that the experiences cannot be identical) and in that difference, no communication or shared understanding occurs.

I completely concede that, if you took an individual and created an identical copy and they discussed some experience and used the symbol "tree" then communication would be perfect and their understanding identical. Away from that example, all communication is in degradation and all understanding differentiated by differences in experience.

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Original post by Timkin Unless of course, one believes that somehow the toddler and adult encode Chinese differently and the adult is only using pattern matching algorithms to associate outputs to inputs. Neuropsychology doesn't bare this out. Which areas of the cortex encode language doesn't depend on the way in which you learn that language, so the only possibility is that we encode information within the same area differently when we learn as a child or as an adult. There isn't, to my knowledge (having just spent 2 years working in a neuro team that does research in this and related areas), any evidence that this is the case. That doesn't mean it isn't the case and we may yet learn this... but I doubt it. So, if the toddler and the adult both understand Chinese, then uniqueness of experience does not define unique understanding... and therefore computers could learn Chinese and presumably understand it if they were given the opportunity to learn Chinese as an adult or toddler does. Of course, this means that the computer must be able to ground the symbols of Chinese and this requires certain sensory abilities.

I completely agree about the neurophysiology part of the above. I don't believe it follows that "uniqueness of experience does not define unique understanding". Understanding is not just about how learning occurs, it is about what learning occurs. A difference in either leads to different understanding. What if individual A had only seen trees and individual B only smelt them. They would both use the symbol "tree" validly. They would both also be using it differently. There may be some communication and similarity of understanding over the symbol "tree" but you agree it would be very limited (if possible at all). This is just an extreme example of what I'm trying to say.

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Original post by Timkin I think that understanding is the ability to take a model of something and link it to one's other models so as to preserve the consistency of all internal models and the ability to make predictions not only as to the behaviour of the new thing being modelled, but also the affect on the rest of the things that are understood. Thus, understanding is about building a set of models forming a self-consistent representation of things in the world and how they behave and interact. This would mean that understanding is contextual to the individuals model but not necessarily contingent on their experiences. Because two individuals models are grounded in the same world, albeit through different interactions with that world, there are sufficient commonalities due to grounding upon which they can share understanding and communicate effectively.

I would not describe that as understanding, although I may be in the minority by not doing so. Maybe we'll find out on this board :)
I think ants have understanding. I don't think ants necessarily have to build internal models to have that undertanding. I think I have an understanding of heat and cold and pain and happiness and depression that has no origin in internal modelling of any phenomena. I don't think models and understanding are related at all.

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Original post by Timkin If understanding is then about the consistency of models grounded in the world, then one can understand something without having experienced it, so long as one can ground enough of the larger context of models so as to make accurate predictions with the new model.

Even if internal modelling is nothing to do with understanding I'd say this bears truth. If I have an understanding of big and grey and leathery skin and prehensile nose and round feet, then your description of an elephant can give me understanding of that concept without my experiencing it. My understanding is limited in the similarity of experience of those words to the concept in question.

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Original post by Timkin So, if you want to teach a computer to understand Chinese, you're going to have to teach it to understand a lot of things in addition to Chinese. Of course, this leaves us with an interesting conundrum: how does one understand the first model? My brief statement on this is that for many animal lifeforms on Earth, it is evident that some understanding is hard-wired into the brain (presumably through evolution). Of course, for human babies, many things are also not understood and it is a very interesting day indeed spent watching ones child and seeing how they try and build consistent models of the world around them without any starting points!

I honestly don't think it matters whether understanding occurs through ontogenic or phylogenic interaction. It's the final form and the behaviour this form causes that defines the understanding (otherwise the copied individual described earlier wouldn't "understand" at all, despite being identical to the individual they're copied from)

Mike

Unfortunately I'm about to head out to dinner, but I'll take a moment to look at one point quickly...

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Original post by MikeD Quote: Original post by Timkin We have the ability to learn by analogy, so in principle we should be able to gain understanding by analogy. I would not describe this as learning without experience. You must have a domain of experience with the world and your understanding of the abstracted, communicated ideas are based in that domain of experience. It might not contain the actual phenomenon you're learning about, but your understanding will be limited to the phenomena you've already experienced.

But then by extension, one cannot have an understanding of compositions of things they have experienced, only an understanding of the components, if they're never actually experienced the composite object/event.

Intuitively this seems wrong to me. Indeed, I think we do build understanding of composite objects/events by understanding the component parts. This is one way we teach by analogy. We consider parts of the problem or thing to learn and by analogy with similar things we gain an understanding of them. We then compose the understanding of the pieces into an understanding of the whole. Do you understand what a Unicorn is? I'm confident that you do. Have you ever experienced one (other than a rendition of what someone else thought a Unicorn was)?

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My opinion is that there are no qualia, no ingrained characteristics of anything. Qualia being defined at dictionary.com as "A property, such as whiteness, considered independently from things having that property." There are no property separate from things. In fact there are no properties separate from an observer's interaction with a thing (observing being an interaction).

I'm not sure that I agree with the definition of qualia... but putting that aside, I think that there are properties separate from observers. We had this discussion in another thread some time ago... I'll try and dig it up and look at it again before continuing...

...for now though, I'm heading off to enjoy good food, good wine and good friends.

Cheers,

Timkin

Perhaps this could be of interest:

With the unicorn analogy,
We were basically given a discription of a unicorn.
We then made up a new object, with those phicical properties, at random.

Then, from its behaviour that we know (from the picture-book, or ?), we generate a model of the unicorns behaviour to stimuli.

After all that, we "understand" unicorns, simply by analogy and egsample.

From,
Nice coder

On how we learn by analogy:

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Original post by Timkin But then by extension, one cannot have an understanding of compositions of things they have experienced, only an understanding of the components, if they're never actually experienced the composite object/event.

In the Unicorn example you could describe to me a horse, a horn and the placement of that horn on the horse's forehead. By my experience of horses and horns and my understanding of how the horn might be placed on the forehead (depending on your explanation), I could have a good visual idea of what you meant by Unicorn. Further, if I had an idea about physiology I might be able to picture how the horn might attach to the bone. If I'd seen a Narwhal (http://www.worldlandtrust.org/images/paintings/narwhal.jpg) I might have an understanding of the fact it might have evolved from a tooth in some distant ancestor. If I'd seen other creatures with similar head accoutrements then I might be able to picture how the Unicorn would use its horn in mating displays or in forms of offensive or defensive behaviour.

This would be my understanding of Unicorn from analogy, all of which require experience, none of which might be true.

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Original post by Timkin I'm not sure that I agree with the definition of qualia... but putting that aside, I think that there are properties separate from observers. We had this discussion in another thread some time ago... I'll try and dig it up and look at it again before continuing...

Shall we find a definition of qualia we both like and discuss things based on that? I'd like to hear some examples of properties that don't require observers.

Mike

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Original post by Nice Coder With the unicorn analogy, We were basically given a discription of a unicorn. We then made up a new object, with those phicical properties, at random. Then, from its behaviour that we know (from the picture-book, or ?), we generate a model of the unicorns behaviour to stimuli. After all that, we "understand" unicorns, simply by analogy and egsample.

Remove the word "random" and that's what I believe.
Except you could not describe the Unicorn to me by any of those physical properties (in a useful way) without my having some experience of those physical properties. Unless you described those physical properties by analogy of other phenomona I had had experience of. Else it's just ungrounded symbolic processing and contains no understanding :)

Mike